Growing Up in a Small Town

We have all heard the stereotypes of growing up in a small town. News travels fast, gossip is all anyone talks about, you know everything about everyone and the world breathes down your neck. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t escape it. Growing up in Weedsport, I can say that each of these generalizations has a grain of truth in them, yet I would much rather grow up in a small town than one of the big cities that people dream about. This may sound a little strange to some people but three specific reasons come to mind as to why I’d rather grow up in the middle of nowhere than a city like New York.

Reason number one: the intimacy. Yes it can be very irritating when it seems that even the cashier at the grocery store knows your life story, but there’s a closeness and strong bond in small towns that it seems you can’t get anywhere else in the world. To me, it’s nice to walk down the school halls everyday and put a name with a face, to know a little about everyone. You can’t exactly do this in a larger city school district. Take Cicero-North Syracuse (CNS) for example. One of my sister’s friends from college graduated from there and said she had upwards of 700 kids in her graduating class. To me that’s ridiculous since you probably wouldn’t even know the names of a quarter of the people in your grade. This makes a small town more appealing to grow up in since you can know not only everyone in your grade, but most likely your school and maybe even a good portion of their families. One of the best things in the world is to go to a Friday night football game when everyone in town is there. It’s so nice to be able to walk among the crowd and know who nearly everyone is and be there with your best friends and just have a good time. There’s an energy when a village like Weedsport gets together like that, and it’s completely inexplicable yet I certainly would not trade it to have grown up in a city.

Reason number two: slower and more relaxed pace of life. People always talk about all the things to do and nonstop energy of big cities, which is great. It’s amazing to think about how energetic these places must be, yet in a smaller town things are (obviously) quite different. Out here in Weedsport you’re in the middle of everything yet secluded from it all. By this I mean if you’re looking for something to do it’s only a 15-minute drive to Auburn, 25 to Syracuse, about an hour from Rochester. These places have just about all you could ask for: restaurants, malls, movie theaters, museums, parks and much more, yet if you want you can just stay home on a Friday or Saturday night, turn the lights off and relax, without disturbance. In a city I feel like you’d never be able to truly shut down since someone is constantly doing something somewhere, a car is always driving down the street and the lights never turn off. It’d be cool to live in a bigger city but wouldn’t you just want to escape from it sometimes? I’d much rather live in a place like Weedsport where it’s relaxed and slow-paced but you’re never too far from something to keep you busy.

Reason number three: you get to discover what the world has to offer. I will say that growing up in Weedsport, I’ve lived a bit of a sheltered life. Yet I still know a fair share about the world, which is actually a good thing to me. Not being familiar with what’s out there is pretty scary but at the same time is wildly exciting. You get to dream about what places like Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago are like, what heading off to college and being on your own will be like and what all the people out there will be like. On many occasions I’ve heard that city kids are already used to being independent and it seems like you’d already know what opportunities are out there if you grew up in a more heavily populated place where you’re around it all. I’ll never ever forget the time I went to Paris. It seemed like around every corner there was something new and there were just as many diverse and interesting people. I was completely amazed, yet many of the locals just looked numb to it all. Going to Paris really made me realize that there is so much more out there than Weedsport, and it made me feel that kids from small towns like ours are more excited for what life has to offer and where the road ahead will bring them.
When all is said and done, I would much rather grow up in a tiny town than big city. It’s an experience like no other that I would never change, and I think it’s time that we stop focusing on the negatives of living in places like Weedsport, and take into account all the great things that they have to offer.