You Know You Live in a Small(ish) Town When...

[belfastboy]

When spring formally arrives because the park swans, having wintered in a dedicated building with outdoor access to a heated pond, are paraded by a pipe and drum band from the facility (which I lived behind for several years) to the Avon River:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...ance-unveils-its-two-day-swan-parade-schedule

The running of the Swans, perhaps?

 

[Fading Fast]

You know you live in a small town when your mailman uses his cell phone to call you at your office, and tells you he delivered a package at your house...but he was worried it might rain and noticed the garage door was unlocked...so he left it inside on the work bench.

Yup. This happened to me.

AF

If only more of the world could somehow work this way.

 

[MisterCairo]

When your town hosts the annual Queens of the Furrow convention, where the provincial Queens of the Furrow prepare for their cage match at the upcoming IPM (International Plowing Match):

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...ratford-to-prepare-for-competition-at-the-ipm

 

[MisterCairo]

...your local Holstein club celebrates its centenary:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...holstein-club-celebrates-100-year-anniversary

 

[Trenchfriend]

When the rooster ist calling a dozen times, after 18:30.

 

[MisterCairo]

Aaaaaaand, they're back on the River Avon:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...people-participated-in-stratfords-swan-parade

Glorious weather for it, hit about 18/65. They are bragging about how big an event this has become, I think it's a shame. I remember being one of a couple of hundred people, holding a rope to keep the buggers in check, as Mr. Millar, the keeper, marched ahead of the pipe band.

Now, we can never get there early enough to get a view, so we've stopped going.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Are those birds from a Royal Swanery? I've read that they can get out of hand.

 

[MisterCairo]

Are those birds from a Royal Swanery? I've read that they can get out of hand.

The formal program began in Canada's Centennial Year of 1967. Two mute swans were given to the PM as a gift, and they were relocated to Stratford, Ontario, as part of the Parks program, with a link to Environment Canada.

They are tagged, banded and snipped so they cannot fly away. Signets born each year, some remain, others are given away or exchanged.

We've had Chinese ducks and geese and other birds over the years.

And yes, they are nasty as f&^%, you cannot let your dog or child near them, but gosh are they beautiful to look at!

 

[Trenchfriend]

When the entire population of your smalltown, including associated communities, sank from the old longtime 8.000 to the actual 7.500. Mainly because of the dying old surrounding villages. The people get older and older, but I'm getting younger and younger.

 

[Atticus Finch]

So we hopped back in the rental car,
and we hit the cruise control;
Pretty soon the town was out of sight.
Though we left behind a fat barmaid, a cowboy and a dog,
Bracin' for a Ringling Friday night!

 

[green papaya]

when the town turns into a "GHOST TOWN" historic tourist attraction like a little place called "LOCKE , CA"

http://www.locketown.com/




Locke, also known as Locke Historic District, is an unincorporated community in California's Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta built by Chinese immigrants during the early 20th century.

 

[MisterCairo]

When the front page headline of your local paper is.....

theft from a vending machine:

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.co...-at-little-falls-car-and-pet-wash-in-st-marys

Suspects described as having chocolate smeared faces...

 

[sheeplady]

You get a play-by-play of your family''s previous evening's activities from your child's teacher... before your child has said a word about such events... and your child's teachsr wasn't there.

Yes, this has happened to me. More than once.

 

[BlueTrain]

Clearly, judging from this thread, there are small towns and there are small towns. When I was little, in the 1950s, my home town had less than 8500 residents. I thought it was more. Today it only has about 6500. Of course, that's just counting people out as far as the city limits. The town didn't really stop there, although one wouldn't say there were suburbs. I was last there for my 50th high school reunion two years ago. The place has changed. I guess it qualifies as a small town.

Not only have most businesses on the main business district, which is smaller than it sounds, disappeared, there is now a bypass, so that little traffic need to pass through town the way it used to. A main east-west highway went through there and the traffic was really awful. It isn't anymore. But that makes it possible to close the main street (which is not Main Street--that's a different street) and have car shows and street fairs. There was nothing like that when I still lived there (through 1963). There is no longer any industry there like there used to be that I know of and I have no idea what those 6500 people do. They can't all be retired.

At any rate, it has a sister city/twinned city in Russia, of all places. It would be interesting to hear how that very unlikely thing happened.

I don't know if this is confined to small towns but references to a location begin with "where such and such used to be." Many buildings have been torn down. The spaces have been used for parking lots for people who used to come to town to go to the places that were torn down.

But you definitely live in a small town when lots of people keep chickens and even a few have horses. Not for riding, though, but for draft purposes.

You live in a small town when other people with the same last name are assumed to be related but you have no idea exactly how.

My hometown was apparently much smaller at one time because none of the adults I knew were actually born there, that is, within the city limits. But they were mostly all from somewhere in the county or the next county over.

My hometown was a county seat and boasted of a courthouse designed by an architect educated in Paris. Paris, France, that is. But being the county seat does not necessarily make it a small town. I can think of two county seats that have fewer than a dozen structures present. In fact, the name of the "town" includes the words court house because that's practically all that's there.

I had also been in a few places in the 1950s that were thriving little villages, not quite towns, that have literally disappeared. You'd never known a building ever stood anywhere around there. They had names and the names still appear on maps but they aren't even ghost towns. At the time they were called "camps" and that implies a temporary place.

It doesn't have to be a big town, whatever that is, to be big enough so that you have no idea how people live on the other side of town. Presumably they lived better than we did because the houses were a lot nicer. There were railroad tracks but I don't remember anyone using the expression "on the other side of the tracks," which I assume people understand the meaning of.

The best thing I remember about growing up there was that the weather was absolutely perfect all-year round. The reality may have been a little different but that's the way I remember it. Otherwise we couldn't have gone to drive-in movies.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Will (sub)urbanization stop, any time in the future? Maybe, when the big cities "go ballistic".

 

[LizzieMaine]

Suburbanization is beginning to reverse, but the unfortunate aspect of it is that it brings gentrification to the cities, as old working-class neighborhoods are colonized by "upscale" types looking for the "authentic experience" and their longtime occupants are driven off. Eventually the yupsters will all live in the city, and the rest of us will have to be satisified with the abandoned and deteriorating remains of suburbia. Unless, of course, we figure out how to build tumbrels.

 

[BlueTrain]

"Ballistic?" What does that mean? Big cities have never been thought of as good places to live, perhaps more so in Germany than anywhere else. Of course there were big cities in other countries, too, but I think that only in Germany was there a conscious effort to suggest that the big cities were bad places for people and to do something about it, usually by escaping it. There was something of a romantic element to the idea, mainly a nostalgic feeling that living in the country (Ländliches Leben) was invariably better than living in the city. Mind you, that didn't mean exactly the same thing as it would in this country, since farmers in the United States generally do not live in little farming villages. But that's beside the point. Anyway, that whole idea only appeared when cities became industrial production centers and grew rapidly when more people moved there, usually from the country, to work in the factories. Escaping the city on weekends wasn't much of a solution, although it was easier when more people had cars. Ultimately, the best solution was to made the cities better places to live. That is not to say it's easy to do.

One problem is that the world is no longer pedestrian friendly, if it ever was. Public transportation is not the simple solution it promises because of the huge investment in facilities and the inconvenience of not living or working where the transportation goes, be it streetcars, busses, subways (the U-Bahn), light rail or what have you, plus the extra time invariably required to make a trip. And you somehow still have to get to the place where you board the bus, the train, etc., where, surprise!, you still have to pay to park.

Sometimes it seems like we'd be just as well off living in a hovel at the foot of the hill where the lord lived in his castle, although the TV reception is always worse at the bottom of the hill than it is on top.

 

[Trenchfriend]

"Ballistic?" What does that mean?

Blowing up by civil-war, etc.. Especially the german big-cities are under surveillance, because the barrel is running over, since late 2015 and just the final "ignition-spark" is absent.

But, I'm living in a smalltown, far from reality, hooray. All the bad stuff is concentrating at the bigger cities, here. And mostly at western-german cities.

 

[BlueTrain]

Another thing about small towns is the presence of characters. They are part of the community, although that is not to say you would necessarily interact with them. If at all possible, you would avoid them. My hometown had one such individual.

His name was Claude Long. He went around properly dressed, always with a jacket and tie and I think also a cap. But he was a long ways from being clean and his jacket (suit coat) was adorned with campaign buttons, the small metal pin on things one used to see. I don't know where he lived, how he lived or anything about him, other than what I've described. I frequently saw him but I never heard him say anything, maybe because I never got that close to him. But I doubt it ever occurred to anyone to try to get him to go elsewhere. That's what happens these days in some places and of course, it did then, too, in some places. But he was at least well enough known to lend his name as a description of someone who was dirty and very badly dressed. He fit the description that Thoreau used to refer to the poor. He wrote that the poor are rarely hungry, cold or naked so much as they are dirty, ragged and gross.

We also used to have occasional callers at home who would present you with a rather dirty card that said they were deaf and dumb (could not speak) and they were looking for a handout. I'm sure that doesn't happen anywhere now but there are still panhandlers here and there. I'm not sure if we ever gave them anything.

Even in the hills of West Virginia, where my hometown is, there were immigrants among us. They were either Italian or Middle Easterners. Never from anywhere else, for what it's worth.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I'd forgotten the deaf-mutes who handed out cards, sometimes with some gimcrack item attached, like a paper flower. The last one I remember was at a truckstop in Oklahoma maybe 20-25 years ago.