Welcome to our small town. We hope you will enjoy your visit!

We are the Smith family of five, two adults and three children, and we live in a small rural farming community. 801 total people live in this community, and we are three hours from the nearest city. Even though some people leave every year, like the most recent graduating class of our local high school, most of us stay because we love it here. While there might not be enough opportunity for young people, it is the quality of life out here that keeps us here year after year.

Nothing beats getting up in the morning and hearing the birds singing, and not hearing horns beeping and sirens blaring. We enjoy having a really short commute to work everyday. I just walk across the hall to my office, while other residents here just walk out the side doors to work plowing fields and tending to their crops.

The pace of life is a lot slower here than in the city. Some of our residents left for a while and came back. It seems they missed the rat race’ here. What most of us love is the fact that we are in charge of our lives. We are in charge of our own schedules, and we can get up really early and work on our farms or work on our cyber jobs. The Internet came to our small little community about five years ago. And we had to fight to get our Jones Cable and Internet.

We don’t have garbage pick up here either. We put our uneaten food in our gardens. In the city they call it composting. We all recycle but we have to take our cans, and glass to the recycling center, that my neighbor started himself. We do have a local school here that accommodates the school aged kids. And there is a separate high school for the older kids.

We are about three hours from the city, where of course they have everything. We have to do our major grocery shopping, appliance shopping and clothes shopping there. For the most part we make a day trip out of going into the city because it is a long ride. When we are there we buy clothes, gas for our vehicles, groceries, and sometimes we even go out to eat at a really nice restaurant.

We have a small movie theater, but we couldn’t get any first run movies that people get in the big city. Seems, we’ll never have a Hollywood movie opening here either. We watch older movies and make a big time out of it. We even have a real movie theater pop corn maker. We have two restaurants and one hair stylist. The hair stylist is my cousin and she does everybody’s hair at her home. Some people just prefer to cut their own hair, though.

There’s no crime here, except when some of the kids get really bored during the summer and see how many mailboxes they can whack with a bat as they drive by at top speed. Sometimes it is hard on the kids living so far from a larger community. They don’t have a mall to hang out at, or a choice of places to work in the summer.

Everyone gathers at the post office every day to pick up his or her mail, and to catch up on local gossip. We have town meetings once a month at the local high school and everybody shows up. We even have swimming, dances and spaghetti dinners at the high school so that everyone can enjoy a night out.

We don’t have big city problems here but that’s why we all live here in the first place. We don’t even sewers out here! But we love doing things the way we want to, and the peace and quiet life affords here. We all work together as a community and when someone needs help, we know because they didn’t show up at the post office.