Small town grapevine

[Deleted]

Most of my brothers and sisters live about 1200 miles north of where I am, and there are a lot of them because my mother and stepmothers kept divorcing my dad. He kept remarrying because he liked being married, and he kept on having kids--some were part of a package deal and some were his own with whomever was his current wife. My mother remarried once and had one son. Therefore, I have a herd of brothers and sisters.  Mother brother is Bill. (I have another brother Bill--this is my brother Bill and my other brother Bill--but that's a whole nuther story.)

Mother brother and father brother are and have been friends since childhood and are the same age. Our hometown is tiny and right on the state line. Mother brother lives on one side of the state line. Father brother lives on the other. Total population of the two towns is about 4,000 if nobody dies on the same day a new baby is born.

Yesterday, the brother with whom I share a mother called to ask about my brother with whom I share a father.

Mother brother is married but only because he and his wife never got around to getting a divorce. They have four daughters and are on reasonable terms and talk often. Mother brother had been told by his wife yesterday that father brother had had a stroke, is unable to talk and can't walk.

My, my, my. It was news to me so messaged another father brother and asked. He told me that the stroke happened a year ago, and he didn't know about it, either, until he went Up North to visit early in the summer this year (he lives 250 miles south of our hometown).

Apparently, although strokes are serious and this one affected his speech and left him with a minor limp, he has recovered and is doing well. He was only hospitalized a couple of days before being discharged to go home in the care of my SIL, a nurse. She didn't see any value in alarming the rest of us in light of the fact that he was expected to make a full recovery.

I called mother brother Bill back and gave him the skinny. He said he wondered why he hadn't seen much of father brother and was glad to hear that he's alive and well, mobile and able to talk. He was anxious to call the wife and suggest that in future she do her due diligence before repeating news from a very slow grapevine.

What we found most amusing is that up there you can't walk across the street without it being telegraphed to the whole town while the good citizens speculate about just exactly why you'd be crossing the street.

We got a laugh out of how long this news took to get across the state line and got there by way of misinformation, then made a 2400-mile round trip to get it right. And we wondered how many times in the next few days, he's going to hear the same misinformation via mother brother's wife, who stops to chat with anybody who will stand still long enough to listen.

[Chocolate Lover]

Glad that whichever Bill (mothers?) is doing fairly well after his stroke. That has to set a record for slowest grapevine ever though. Especially for a small town! 

[busymom]

Wow!  That's got to be some sort of record for a small town.  The towns my folks grew up in, the gossip happened so quickly, the whole town would know before you came back home.  

[gracendignity]

I've lived in a small town my whole life and I am quite familiar with the small town grapevine.  It's amazing how word gets around and they way in which it travels!

Daughter #1 lives about 25 miles from me in the next town over where many of us in this small town do shopping, dining out, etc.  Daughter #2 lives 1000 miles away in a big city.  It is not at all uncommon for her to text one or both of us asking about the weather or something newsworthy.  Half the time daughter #1 and/or I have no idea what she is talking about.  The other half the time daughter #2 is able to give us the back story and more information than the news outlets are sharing.  It's a running joke among us that the daughter who lives 1000 miles away knows more gossip than the 2 of us who live local to the gossip.  LOL!


As for small town grapevine, I like this expression:  When you live in a small town even if you have no idea what you are doing, everyone else does!  

[Deleted]

Nov 14, 2019 16:33:51 GMT -5 busymom said:

Wow!  That's got to be some sort of record for a small town.  The towns my folks grew up in, the gossip happened so quickly, the whole town would know before you came back home.  

Usually our whole town knows before the ambulance is out of your driveway.

Way back when the Green Hornet and I were going to move back up there and he'd already accepted a job, both of those little towns had it on good authority that we'd already bought a house. Huh? It was in the days before you could even go online to look at what was available. When we got there, we looked at the one we supposedly had under contract, and it wasn't a house we'd have even bothered to look at. We never did learn which "good authority" had informed everybody else which house we were (not) buying.

[sesfw]

DH #2 grew up in a very small farming community in the 1940s.  His mom would know before he got home from school what kind of day he had.  Mostly whether or not he got into trouble.  He never did figure out how this happened.

This was before phones in every home.

Me?  I grew up in a large city where no one knows anything.  LOL

[toomuchreality]

Haha!
I too am glad your brother is basically okay. Sorry he had a stroke though.

I grew up in a city neighborhood. The lady that lived across the street from us knew EVERYTHING us kids did and she made sure my parents did too.🙄 😠