I was born and raised in a small town in South Wales, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, where you walk in to the local supermarket on a weekday morning and bump in to at least five people you are acquainted with, or who know your parents or your grandparents, or who you are somehow related to, distantly, through marriage, or who used to go to school with your brother's roommate's cousin. Everyone in my town knows everyone else, somehow. It is THAT close-knit.

That is what people seek, right? A place where "everybody knows your name" (sung to the Cheers theme tune, of course). Everybody strives to be part of a community, to feel like they belong. Wrong. Not everybody. Not a twenty-something woman trying to make her way through life, trying to find herself. It's difficult to find who you really are when you are so often defined by whose daughter you are or who you were friends with in junior school.

Thus, at the age of twenty-five, I left the town I had known for all of my life, a huge step for me personally, and a huge adventure for someone from our town. I traveled. I saw Hawaiian sunsets and Australian thunderstorms, the hostels of America and the temples of Bangkok. I went in search of who I really was. And, somewhere along the way, I found the answers I was looking for. In some remote corner of the world, I realized something I never thought possible. I realized that, despite the many wonders of this beautiful world, I missed my town.

Now, I have returned to small town Wales, to familiarity, to the people who know the daily business of everyone living in their street, to the "good mornings" and "how's your grandparents" and "what are you up to nows". I've grown quite fond of the children who kick their football in to our garden every day after school; I've grown to enjoy my bank manager's stories about my grandmother's youth; I've grown used to the teacher who parks her car outside my house every morning, the one who never fails to give me an apologetic wave as she rushes in to the local junior school. I'm even beginning to like the postman's cheeky early morning inquisition!

There's a unique quality to this small town in South Wales, something so unique that it has drawn me home and captured my soul. Here, I will stay and make a home where my husband and I can raise our children, in this town of familiar faces and cheery hellos. This closeness, this sense of community, would be impossible to find anywhere else.

Learn more about this author, Michelle Harper Davies.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Why do you like where you currently live??
We want to hear your view. Write now!