One of the downsides to living in a small town, especially my small town, is having to drive to a larger city to do major shopping. Unfortunately, my small town is almost 100 miles from a city large enough to have any major shopping. This does, however, make shopping an experience, one that can be a lot of fun if you go with the right person(s).
My mother and I made a "quick" trip to the city to buy a new faucet for my leaky sink after I got off work on Friday. I had looked all around our small town and couldn't find the type of faucet I wanted, and I knew Lowe's would have one. Normally, I would buy it online and not need to drive an hour and a half one-way to buy a faucet, but I had someone coming to my house the next day to install it, so...
One thing that seems to never fail when going to "the big city" to shop, is running into someone from our small town. At Lowe's we ran into my best friends' in-laws (yes, that was an intentional plural possessive. Two of my besties are married to brothers and have the same in-laws) I hadn't seen them in awhile because we no longer go to the same church. It was nice to catch up.
After finding the faucet, we went across the road to Target so I could look for a present for my niece (what I had ordered on line was NOTHING like I expected, but that's another story). As we were leaving target (without the present), who did we see but our neighbor and her little girls.
It is so weird to be in a huge store, in a big city and look over and see someone from your small town. You just have to go over and say "hi". It is like looking at a Where's Waldo and actually finding Waldo in your first glance at the page. Maybe it's more like winning the find-a-friend-among-400,000-people lottery. Either way, it's always a little shock...even though it happens every time I go to the "big city".
So even in a big city, there is still a little small town feel. It reminds me of the song, "It's a Small World After All." Sometimes the big city can be like a small town. Of course, there are people out there who would consider a town with just under half a million in population to BE a small town. I would completely disagree. Probably because my town has under 3,000 people. Now THAT'S a small town!
3 comments:
So true. This happens to me and my family as well. As for a small town, 300-600 is small. Most of my growing up years was in a town of about 2,000. But after living 3 miles outside of a town of 600, even that seems big. At least they have a grocery store and three gas stations compared to our one station/store. But hey, we have the only flashing light in the whole county :)
When did Springfield get 400,000 people???
@Vito and Gina - I looked it up... You do realize it is the 3rd largest city in the state (bigger than Jeff City). And the population is just people who live in the city limits, which is probably less than half what actually make up the city.
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