Have you ever lived in a really small town?

I grew up in a small bedroom community about 15 miles outside of Portland, OR, which was under 10,000 people. It was relatively quiet, but I had a nice childhood there. That being said, I was close to the city and never felt stifled because I had access to culture. I imagine it's different if you live in a small town that is isolated from any big metropolitan areas.

I shuttled between school in a large city (around 4 million at the time) and, every school holidays, to King Island off the coast of Tasmania - population at the time around 1100, population of the larger of the only two settlements around 500.

It was challenging at the time but it was all that I knew from the ages of 5 to 17.

In retrospect it was a strange existence. I’ve been back a few times as an adult and while it is beautiful and wild it is also very restricted. There’s a high school there and there are people who were born there and never left.

Not for me!

Grew up in LA. I have always fantasized about what a childhood would have been like in a small town.

Come on DL, I need stories!

Yes. I spent the first 18 years of my life in a town of 5400. Which, by midwestern standards, wasn't really considered that small. We were the county seat, and thus the "big city" to the country folks and the people in the really little towns of 400 and 200 and smaller.

I guess it didn't feel that isolated because we were within a 120 miles of "big cities" like Kansas City and Omaha and got all their TV stations so we felt connected to the world.

A flyover town of about 5,000. In the middle of Nowhere. It was big news when we got a McDonald's. Factory town heavily populated by Appalachian refugees. So yeah, bigoted and homophobic.

It's actually shrunk since I lived there. An aging population and down to one grocery store. Mostly Poors.

Pluses: the whole town was like your backyard. You could walk to school. Houses were affordable.

Yes. As a child and bu choice as an adult.

I was born in the 1960s in a town of about 6000 people, a half hour from a town 3x that size. My parents avoided cities, preferring to explore the countryside in their holidays. They were convinced that cities were full of rude people, cheats, and worse.

My parents likes only the simple foods that they had grown up with. Some Italian-American colleague of my father's finally persuaded him to take a few jars of his Italian style tomato sauce. You might have thought were were sitting down to eat a life-or-death dinner of Japanese pufferfish because it contained...garlic. There were two Jewish families in the town: one owned a shoe store, the other a shipping company and factory. There were a handful of Asian families, doctors with few exception. There was a sprinkling of Catholic families, enough only to fill one quite small church. The rest of the population was one-third black and two-thirds white.

The sameness and smallness of the place bore hard on me from a young age. Because I read. We did take a couple of trips abroad, and did drive (fast) through some big cities. I knew that better things awaited elsewhere but they wouldn't come until I went to university. Once away, my life flipped to big cities, travel, favoring "exotic" cuisines, esoteric music and art, friends from different places in the world, very different backgrounds, etc. I've lived in big cities since.

I could live in a small town now, but not any small town, and it would have to be easily accessible to other, bigger places. My one break with big city life was a long stint in the countryside, not even in s town or a crossroads. It was beautiful, idyllic, but a 30 minute drive to anywhere. I enjoyed it there but at the time I was travelling a lot to big cities.

I live in a town of about 8500. It’s ok, but I really only venture out to go shopping or visit family, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything.

Iris DeMent's lament for small towns

Grew up in a prairie Canadian town of about 1,000 people. The nearest city - about 175,000 people - was about 1.5 hours away. It was the 80s. At the time, we had quite a few services and businesses. It was easy to get to the “city” to shop. You didn’t feel completely isolated. But small rural towns in the 80s weren’t great for “different” kids like me. Bullied relentlessly, teachers turned a blind eye. Of course, boomer parents, so everything that happened to me was my fault. It was idyllic if you were part of the in-crowd, and played hockey or football. Otherwise, it was a pretty stressful, lonely existence.

Everybody knows everybody. Gossip and sports and church are major pastimes. You couldn’t buy or experience things until the Internet and more easily accessible travel changed that. Most food is considered exotic. Most things are considered overpriced. Cost of living is low, but so are standards of living and pay. People have to drive everywhere and consider it weird not to do so.

This isn’t exactly a secret, OP. What are you trying to figure out?

yep! small town in very remote Minnesota. First job out of college. Everyone in town knew me. I mainly loved it but would drive to the nearest city--Duluth--on the weekends just to be somewhere that no one knew me. I was far too young to stay in a small place for long. I moved back to Minneapolis after 2 years. But one of the best 2 years of my life.

Now I live in a small resort town that explodes with tourists in the summer. Absolutely love living in a small place where everything is easily accessible and there's a true sense of community. We're all untied in both hating tourists and relying on them for income.

I’m thinking of moving to one after spending 40 years in the city. I don’t think we were meant to live such atomized lives, and I’d like to have some semblance of community

Things were hopping in Jane Powell's small town.

R14, Where did you spend your 1st 18 years?

R4, Where did you spend your 1st 18 years?

I think you have to tell us, R14

I grew up in a city 20 minutes away from Boston and my parents decided to move to the suburbs and so I moved to a town 45 minutes away from Boston with a population of 6,000.

I was only there for 2 years. My parents hated it so much, they moved back. They both refer to it today as a big mistake they made.

It was very boring. There was nothing but houses and a little downtown area that had a post office and convenient store so not a lot of social activity or things to do.

And after having grown up in the city and being told how wonderful and rich the suburbs were, I was very unimpressed as most houses were ranches and looked like they were built by the Pilgrims.

I grew up in a town of around a thousand, which was surrounded by a few similar towns of between 500 and 1000 people. This was in western Pennsylvania, just east of Allegheny County/Pittsburgh.

In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, we rode a school bus about 10-12 miles away to a town of around 15,000 where the junior high and high school was. Two other towns within a 30 minute drive had populations of 15,000 people and 30,000 people, respectively. So we weren't total yokels.

But our small town itself had one of those everyone-knows-your-business feelings to it. Everyone seemed to know who was cheating on who. Though I admit, I didn't find out that the local Catholic church had a boytoucher abuse problem during my HS years until many years later.

Small town Massachusetts

Right on the ocean, about twenty-five minutes to Boston, nice people, mostly registered Independents who vote Democrat, and a pretty place to grow up. It's really expensive to buy a house there now.

R15 Let's just say...north of St. Joe.

I am from Vermont. The large majority of my life prior to adulthood was in towns with, at the time, between 500- 2000 people. I, for the most part, absolutely fucking hated it. Every single one of them.

I grew up in a village of about 2000 in the Irish countryside and people were not sweet as apple pie!

Small towns = nosy and suspicious people

Harper Valley and Peyton Place

I may have a slightly different view on the subject because the small town I grew up in and where my husband and I are now are only about 90 miles from Manhattan. We're in an area that is heavily populated by weekenders year round, so even though all these little towns clustered around us are made up of a few thousand people each, there's a surprisingly large LBGTQ population, really good food and plenty of culture. I moved away for school and for a number of years after, but I've always had an affinity for the country and particularly this area. That being said, everyone does indeed know everything, there are very few secrets. Doesn't really bother me, but then if you're on a committee in town for something, you have to know which personalities have forged alliances, who despises this one, blah blah blah. It reminds me of high school, and I continue to just mix with all sorts. When you sort of float between different groups and people, no one can really say anything.

I think there's also a huge difference between "small towns".

A small town located in a densely populated area like the Northeastern seaboard isn't quite the same as living in a small town in a very rural area.

Yes, Lincoln isn’t Omaha.

People from small towns are of two types: 1.) Those for whom high school was a high point in their lives, and 2.) Those whose "best years" came later.

People from small towns hate you if you stick around, but they really hate you if you leave for other places.

People from small towns are the models for Fake Americans. Filled with platitudes and promises on the outside, and on the inside sorry they didn't hide before you spotted them.

Small town in rural Ohio. They told us we were Midwesterners, but we were in fact Appalachians. There were fewer than two thousand residents in my town until the 2010s; now there are around 2500 thanks to residential development in former corn fields north or town.

There were five churches, ten gas stations (!), one school building housing K-12. There were 61 in my high school graduating class, 70% of whom were there all thirteen years. If you started school after fifth grade, you were always an outsider. The trope of everyone knowing everyone was true. You knew which church they went to, which street they lived on, where their parent(s) worked, and for most, their phone number.

We had one IGA store, which you went to for small shopping. Otherwise you drove a half hour to shop at a Kroger. There was no fast food until the 1990s when a Hardee’s opened. The nearest McDonald’s was fifteen miles away. There were no apartments in town and almost everybody owned the homes they lived in.

I went off to college at eighteen, then graduate school, then moved to LA where I’ve lived for more than thirty years. My hometown has changed a lot in the forty years since I left. I still visit my family that lives in and around there. As I age, I tend to recall the good things about having grown up in a small town, but occasionally I remember how suffocatingly heteronormative it actually was.