Growing up in a small town

I find myself often comparing the way I grew up, to how my children are being raised and the environment of a larger town contrasted to small town life. And when I say small, I mean a town of less than 3,000 people. As children, my siblings and I would run and play until we were too exhausted to move another inch. We had a huge backyard with tons of trees to climb, and lots of places to hide. My mom loves to garden and we always had tons of beautiful flowers and plants growing all around our home. As a kid, I just loved my life.






















We had lots of freedom to roam, ride bikes, take walks, daydream, and use our imaginations. I remember during the summer time racing my bike up and down the little slope of a road in our neighborhood until it got too dark to see where I was going. We knew most, if not all of our neighbors (we still laugh about the ditch man and his mean dogs) and there was always something to do. We would have sword fights with our awesome home made shields and wooden swords (that should be a whole other post), made forts in the backyard, played army, ran through the sprinklers and played catch.


As far as the town itself went, we had one semi-grocery store, a gas station, a mini-mart, two taverns, a post office, a grade school and junior high, one movie store or another, a shady motel, and that's about it. We lived close enough to the grocery store that we could walk or ride our bikes and get a pop or a candy bar. As a kid, what more do you need? We hardly ever ate fast food since the nearest McDonald's or anything else was about 20 minutes away. One of my earliest childhood memories of going into "town", was to see the movie "E.T." at the old Hermiston Theater. I think I was about two or three years old at the time. Mostly everyone in town knew each other and I went to school with a lot of the same kids all the way from kindergarten through high school. At the time, I thought that was kind of boring not having very many new people to meet, but looking back now I think it was pretty neat.


As I got into my teenage years, and my younger brother and sister were the ones roaming the neighborhood, times were starting to change. You had to be more aware of where they were, who they were with and so on. I had one terrifying experience when I was babysitting and my little brother went off with some friends without telling me and I did not know where he was. I couldn't find him for over two hours. There were some pretty questionable people who had moved into the area around that time and I was beside myself with worry. I thought I was going to kill him when he finally came back home.

Today I am very careful about where my children are and who they are with. I let Kendle ride her bike, but only in front of our house where I can see her. Sometimes I wonder if I am being too overprotective. I am kind of a worry wart about those type of things. I feel sad she won't have the same experiences that I did growing up. I wish my children would have room to roam, places to explore, and the freedom to run the day away. Like the old saying goes, "you don't know what you got till it's gone".

So ya, I grew up in a podunk, boondocks town. We didn't have sidewalks, cool stores, or a place to get a decent burger, but what we did have you can't buy nowadays.

F-U-N.