Upon moving to Richmond 5 years ago, we quickly learned that “Oh, that’s Richmond for ya” is the appropriate reaction when one of those small world coincidences takes place. It’s meant to reference that despite being a fairly legit city, Richmond has a small town vibe where everyone seems to know everyone else through no more than a degree or two of Kevin Bacon friends and acquaintances. So when, for example, you find out that the girl at your favorite lighting outlet rents an apartment in the backyard of a house that you’ve crashed (and where your sister got married) you say “That’s Richmond for ya.” True story, by the way.
Well, we’ve got a new story that confirms that this phrase has some real truth to it. Here it goes.
Last week we got new neighbors. Like, right next door (the other side of the patio fence). Not knowing who they were, what kind of neighbor’s they’d be or what kind of house/yard they’d keep made us a bit nervous. They closed right before Memorial Day but were having some things done to the house before moving in last week, so we didn’t get to meet them right off the bat. Suspenseful.
So recently my cousin was in town and we had her over to BBQ on the patio. At some point my dad wandered off with her 5 month old son (not in a creepy way, but in a “let’s go look around” way). Upon his return, my dad said “Oh yeah, I met your neighbors.”
Sherry: “No way, who are they? What’s their story?” (Yes, our curiosity had turned us into gossips)
My Dad: “Well, they’re Brad and Angelina…” (Names have been changed to not put the new neighbors on blast – plus it’s more entertaining this way)
Me: “Wait, they sound familiar.” (Note: had their names really been Brad and Angie, I’m sure I would’ve placed them more easily)
My Dad: “…and they have a young daughter named Viv.” (cough… NotHerRealName… cough)
[LONG PAUSE, then picture light bulbs going off above both of our heads]
Me & Sherry: “No way! We know them!!!! They almost bought our house!”
Remember last year when we were selling our old house? And how we did For Sale By Owner? Well that meant we met all of the prospective buyers face-to-face and Brad and Angelina were not only the first people to tour our house but they also seemed to be the folks (out of a total of 16 showings) who appreciated the house the most (which of course made our hearts swell with pride). We could totally picture them lovingly moving into our first baby. Weird sentence, but you know what I mean.
Obviously they didn’t buy our house (they just weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger and sell the house they had yet). But as much as the 2010 John & Sherry wanted this nice couple to buy our house, the 2011 John & Sherry are much happier to have them as next door neighbors. Especially since their daughter is only 11 months older than Clara (hello playdates) and, like Clara, already seems to have a thing for Burger. Not that we’re getting ahead of ourselves or anything, but they’re basically destined to be BFFs. (Sidenote: their daughter already has a nickname for Clara, which is “dolly” which is just about enough to make a grown man melt).
Oh, and the other night I spotted Brad wearing a Mountain Dew t-shirt. And you know how well I get along with guys in soda shirts (that’s Jeremy Bower, btw)…
When we re-met them (as neighbors, not prospective buyers) we all laughed at what a small city world it is. They added that our old house even turned up as a comp on their appraisal when they finally got around to selling their house six months later, so they were just thinking about it recently. And, to complete the hat trick of weird coincidences, we learned their movers were the same folks that moved out the previous owners of our house (they showed up and started laughing as soon as their realized they had “done” the house next door less than six months prior). I guess that’s Richmond for ya…
Okay, now your turn. What’s your best or latest small world story? Do they happen as often in your town as they do in ours? Also, does the video at the beginning of this post make you want to dance? Me too.
Psst- One of our favorite ever it’s-a-small-world stories is when the original owners of our first house contacted us. Check out that story here.
Patty says
My boyfriend and I were at a friend’s party one time, shortly after buying our first house, and I met a very nice girl who was also in the process of looking for a house. She was telling me about a place she and her husband had just looked at that was stolen right out from under them. She was describing this house and things started to sound verrrrry familiar. Turns out, that house was OUR house! (And we thought the realtor was lying to us when he said another couple was interested in the house.) Now we’re friends and they still call us “house thieves”!
Sheryl J says
Oh, and forgot to mention my other small world: the Armed Forces.
I met my husband in Lemoore, CA (middle of nowhere!) while we were both in the Navy. While getting to know each other, we started talking about our hometown and realized we both went to the same high school, he was a senior, I was a freshman. We didn’t know each other back then, so we found it funny that we “met” each other 1500 miles from home, 3 years later and we were both assigned to the same squadron.
Katy says
We moved from Clemson to Charleston, SC in April, but we were renting on a separate island when we first moved down here. In April we closed on our house and within 72 hours we realized how small our world really was.
Clay (the husband) turned 25 in February. He’d been eyeing a new trumpet for a few months. He had the manager at a local music store bring in a few for him to try and he fell in love with one, but it just wasn’t in our budget at the time. I called in the entire family to go in on it for his birthday instead and worked with the manager to keep it a surprise until his birthday. You only turn 25 once. The day after we moved in Clay was standing in the yard with my dad and the neighbors came over to say hi. The male neighbor and Clay had that moment where they thought they knew each other but they couldn’t place it. Finally the neighbor asked Clay if he played the trumpet and it turned out that the manager who sold me the trumpet was our new neighbor.
Then it got even weirder two days later. The neighbor on the other side of us had been out of town with family when we moved in. Clay and I were doing yard work when they came back and the neighbor introduced herself. Her brother got out of the car and looked at Clay and said “Dirt?” (Clay’s nickname- Clay/Dirt… it’s the same thing in SC). Clay was part of Carolina Crown a touring Drum Corps when he was in high school and the neighbor’s brother was a fellow corpsmen that happened to sit in the seat in front of him on the bus for the entire season.
We moved 45 minutes away from our old house, so we just didn’t expect to know one person… let alone two at our new house. It’s a small world, especially the music world.
Lynn Power says
This is in reference to a previous post about TV designers. Had to mention the show Love it or List it. WARNING: Addictive! Anyway…it’s on W Network (I say W in my best GW Bush accent) and you might not get it, ’cause it’s Canadian! Great show! Great ideas! http://www.wnetwork.com/Shows/Love-It-Or-List-It/Episodes.aspx
Sara Rose says
i live in a smaller town called redding in northern california…. i the real northern california. we are about 4 1/2 hours away from san fran.Redding is town were everyone knows everyone. maybe there is about 5 degrees of seperation between any two people. here is an example.
My best friend(also call her my hetero-life-mate) is married to guy who’s ex wife is my older brothers ex girlfriend. No joke.
Michelle says
I have two small world stories!
The person that bought our house in Kansas City used to be the pastor at my grandma’s church in a little town south of Wichita.
We sold our house because we moved to Denver. I went to an engagement party at a friend’s house last weekend & ran into one of my brother’s ex-girlfriends from Kansas.
Crazy!
Christina says
I live in Mississippi where every conversation eventually leads to…”Do you know so-and-so” or “Are you related to the Jackson so-and so’s”…..So…I’ve had many “that’s Mississippi for ya” moments including finding out that my new roomates in college were good friends with the guy I major crushed on and exchanged letters with from summer camp 10 years previously; finding out that the girl I just started talking to about Jesus in the union on campus is the sister of the guy that I’m about to start dating–that happened 7 or so years ago, and now that guy is my hubbie and that girl is my sis-in-law; and most recently while at a b-day party at the park my little girl walked in front of the swings and got mowed down–twice–and in the middle of the I-freaked-out-hysterically-crying-scene another guest at the party comes up and says,”I think I was your English teacher in Highschool.” She was and when we went to visit her a few weeks later we found out that she lives in the former house of the family my hubbie worked for in college. That’s Mississippi for ya!
Kate @ Savour Fare says
Well, I live in Pasadena, which is a little smaller than Richmond (150,000) but is dwarfed by the much bigger city next door (Los Angeles). This doesn’t stop the fact that my husband works for the dad of one of my friends from high school, the priest that married us almost moved in next door to my mother, and I can’t go to the Farmer’s market without running into someone I know.
Kim S says
Ok I’ve got a good small world story…last May my husband and I went on a Mediterranean cruise, and during our stop in Florence we noticed that a couple in our tour group had a Florida Gator backpack. We too are proud members of the “Gator Nation” so we sneakily arranged to sit next to them at lunch so we could say “Hey, go Gators! Did you guys go to UF?” It turns out that yes, they both went there (several years before my husband and I) but not only that, they lived in THE EXACT APARTMENT (not just the complex, the actual apartment) that I lived in during my senior year. Weird, right?! We ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the trip and had so much fun!
Shannon says
This makes me so happy to be moving back to Richmond – I can’t wait to get there.
Blair says
TOTALLY unrelated question: I just got my first bottle of Dr. Bronner’s (seriously, it took me that long to get rid of my leftover hand soap in the house – your Almost-Dr. Dan post from ages ago convinced me!) and need to fill up my hand soap dispensers in the kitchen and bathrooms. Do you dilute it when you put it in hand soap dispensers? If so, what’s your approximate ratio? I’ve read all sorts of different things online.
YoungHouseLove says
Yup, I dilute it about half-way. It lasts forever and still does it’s thing! And diluting it seems to make our pumps flow well (we have heard some people have clog issues).
xo,
s
Krystal says
This one is sad, but it’s made me think a lot lately. I don’t know if you’ve heard about Lauren Spierer, the IU student who has gone missing. Well, I go to IU and the Missing posters cover nearly every surface on campus. I didn’t realize until I saw new posters with a different picture of her, but we had two classes together the spring of our freshman year and talked quite a bit with one another. She was my friend and I feel awful about not figuring out who she was when I first heard the news. We never exchanged last names and I think the picture of her on the mainstream poster isn’t very true to life, so I’ve tried not to beat myself up about it while my heart still breaks for her and her family. You never imagine something like this will happen to some one you know.
jenn says
haha i laughed that entire minute of the dog dancing. loved it.
sort of a small world story….
i just saw a preview of the next rachel ray for tomorrow and she will be using your bff sue the napkin in her epi for some home design ideas. woop woop!
YoungHouseLove says
Woooop! Sue is famous!!
xo,
s
Annalea says
Small world story: my cousin and my husband’s cousin married into the same family (siblings, actually–my cousin married the sister, his cousin married the brother). Good thing it’s an awesome family, and we love them all. It’s kinda fun getting family news about that family from both sides of ours. ;o)
Annalea says
P.S.) My cousin’s family and my husband’s cousin’s family don’t live anywhere NEAR each other . . . it’s a small-world-via-the-same-college deal. Both of the aforementioned cousins and their sibling spouses all attended the same university.
Heather with a C says
When I was in college, I did a semester abroad in Florence, Italy. A bunch of my friends and I decided to spend a long weekend in Munich, Germany at Oktoberfest. While on the train from Florence to Munich, I saw a flash of blond hair that I recognized pass by my cabin on the train. It was an old high school friend I hadn’t seen in 6 years since she moved away from Richmond and transferred to another school. On top of the weirdness of us both being Munich bound, we were both doing a semester abroad in Florence. We also ran into eachother again in the Hofbrau Haus tent (which was full of thousands of people), so it seemed pretty remarkable to run into eachother again.
My husband is originally from PA, and it only took him about 1 week of living in Richmond to run into someone who knew someone I knew. One of the weirder circumstances is that while in med school, he did a rotation with a doctor whose BFF is one of my dad’s law partners.
Just this past weekend I was at a party where I was introduced to the girlfriend of one of my husband’s coworkers. Turns out we went to middle school together for a year about 15 years ago.
I have so many more small world Richmond stories. I love this city! I can’t wait to see what small-world connections come up when my 14 month old goes to school and it turns out that his friend’s mother’s brother played baseball with my brother in the Huguenot Little League.
NatalieM. says
When I was ready to make a little income after having my son. I decided to look on craigslist for someone needing child care part time and some one that would enjoy the fact that my son was included in the deal. I replied to 2 posts and the second took a nibble at me. We got to the point where the mom was checking my references and I put a previous manager and a coffee company that I also was a manager…The next thing I knew my cell phone was ringing. It was another manager I had worked with. He said “Natalie, you just emailed my wife!”
It has been a perfect fit ever since. They have Irish twins and my son is about 4 months older then their oldest. They sure keep me busy.
EMMA S says
I worked in a lingerie store for about 5 years on Vancouver Island, B.C. Three years ago I made a decision to start a new adventure in a place where I knew one person, about 1500km north of “home”. I got a job as an admin. assistant in an office in my new town and settled in. About a year later I had a woman walk through our doors and stop abruptly, staring at me. Then she yelled out “OH MY GOD! You sold me this bra! This is the best bra I’ve ever owned!”, and then she proceeded to whip her shirt up to show me! And out of the hundreds (or thousands) of people I’ve sold bras to, I actually remembered her too! 1500km away from where we first met, I was seeing her bra again.
(I used to be able to eyeball people and determine their bra size in a matter of seconds, which endlessly amused my male friends who used to make a game out of it on pub nights – alas, this talent has now fallen by the wayside. Sad, I know)
EMMA S says
And the other one belongs to my parents. As a family we moved to Vancouver Island in 1995 from a small town in England. I was only 12. When we moved my mom was really lonely and was trying to make new friends. She joined a local social website for English ex-pats, and started talking to a woman named Linda. A few weeks later Linda and her husband came for dinner. It turned out that not only was this couple English, they had lived in the very same town as us. And while comparing notes on where in that town they’d lived, we uncovered that they had owned the house right next to ours, up until about 6 months before my parents bought their house. If my parents had bought their house a year earlier than they did, we would have been neighbours with these people in England – and then we all moved to the same town in Canada. Weird, right?
Lindsey O. says
I’ve got kinda of a small town story. I had just got out of a few rough relationships in a row when I moved back to VA from NC. I wasn’t interested in anything serious at all but when interest sparked I started hanging out with my local smoothie shop manager because he seemed nice and harmless, as well as cute! I had been sort-of dating him for a few weeks when I went to his house one evening to swim in his family’s pool. For whatever reason we took a swim break to look at some of his family’s photo albums. My Dad and I were estranged at the time so wouldn’t you imagine my surprise when pictures of my Dad start showing up in this photo album!! Turns out the guy’s father and my Dad were fairly good friends. I was so weird-ed out by the connection that I never got together with him again! Poor guy probably thought he did something wrong but it was really just me!
Sara says
I know of a few…not super great but kinda neat anwyhow random moments:
About 7 years ago my mom had jury duty and when the jury was released for a lunch break my mom made friends with another juror and they ended up going to lunch together and doing a little shopping, a few years later I meet my future husband and at our wedding shower my mom recognizes the juror, it is my husband’s aunt!
When my husband was 7 he and his family went to Disney World, while they were at the Magic Kingdom they randomly ran into their neighbors (from PA)!
One time my husband and I were walking the streets of Las Vegas going from one casino to the next (even though we don’t gamble) and as we were stopped on the sidewalk for a red light, my husband looks to his left and standing right next to him was a kid he went to high school with!
Lauren says
oh my gooosh this happens to me all the time! So much so that as soon as I meet someone, I immediately set out in asking them questions to figure out how we’re connected through mutual people. It works so often! I live in Long Beach, CA, by the way. Hometown of Snoop Dogg and Cameron Diaz (yeah we’re totally bffs….not)
Ok I’ll keep this one short.
My husband, who I met when I was 20 and he was 24, was listening to me talk about the first time I ever went to a hotel party. It was after prom and I was in 11th grade. I couldn’t believe that my parents let me go (I was a good kid and I behaved so I guess I had earned/deserved the trust… but I digress). Well, come to find out, my husband was at that very party… and we never managed to meet until 3 years later! We went to different high schools and he graduated before I was even a freshman! So weird that we didn’t manage to meet one another until 3 years later in a totally different setting apart from any mutual high school acquaintances. (To put it in perspective, Long Beach has 5 public high schools alone, with each holding over 3000-4000 students, this doesn’t count all of the private schools in the city as well).
Erin says
About 4 years ago we moves from a town of about 150,000 to a town 2 hours away with about 4200. When we moved, we found we had so many weird connections to the town. Our neighbors in our old town were raised in the town we were moving to and we didn’t realize it until we told them where we were moving about a week before. I told a vendor that I worked with on a weekly basis that I was moving and found out that his fiancé is from that town and that my husband would be working with her aunt at the school he was hired at. My husband coaches football and we found out that one of the wives of his fellow coaches was one of my husband’s grandfather’s students when he created and taught in the computer department at a local community colleges. These are only a few of the weird connections that we have with our new town. There are at least 20 more! I guess that means that we are definitely where we should be!
Lisa says
When we were living in DC, I flew out to Dallas to be with my new husband (he was a musician with the USMC and they were performing there for a few weeks). Anyway, I was at the Texas State Fair wondering around while he was working and who did I see but my mom’s best friend and her husband from SC. I was a homesick newlywed at the time and I just about knocked them over with my running hug. Good times!
Another: When I was growing up in West Columbia, SC, a Vietnamese family joined our church after having to evacuate from Vietnam. Decades later, several of the siblings had also moved to the DC area. The sister lived in the neighborhood next to ours and the brother’s son was on our son’s soccer team. Weird. It was great to get to know them again at all those soccer practices and games.
laura says
you’ve got to love these small world stories.
in 2008, me, my husband and our then-8 month old daughter were visiting his family in hawaii. in the elevator of our hotel, i happened to run into one of my old attorneys that i worked with back in nyc circa 2003. my jaw about dropped to the floor when he walked into our elevator. he then looked at my girl in her stroller and goes “is that ‘thing’ yours?” ha! we wound up hanging out a few more times on that trip. it was such a great way to rekindle an old friendship.
to top it off, on that same trip, while at the airport waiting for our return flight to board, we ran into an old UVA buddy who we hadn’t seen since our graduation in ’01. he was on our plane back to the mainland. :)
Courtney says
Small world…My then boyfriend and I were in London, and one night while at a pub we overheard an American talking at another table. She had a very distinctive voice/accent, so my boyfriend and I were making bets on where she was from. We ended up going over and talking with her, and not only was she from America, but she lived in Dallas (we lived in Austin at the time), and she also went to my high school (I grew up in Ft. Worth, TX) a few years before I did.
But it gets better…a year and a half later my boyfriend and I got married in Dallas, and after our wedding and reception we went to a bar with some friends. While at the bar I overhear a woman talking and laughing, and it’s that same woman (she really did have a very distinctive voice)! It was amazing! I went up to her, and she remembered us, we talked for a while, and she ended up buying me, my new husband, and all our friends a round of drinks.
Such an incredibly small world…
Nicky at Not My Mother says
I have a great small world story! Back in days of yore (about 2001) I owned a house in the Melbourne suburb of Chelsea. Then my marriage broke up and I moved to London, and the house was sold at the end of that year (with me still overseas).
Fast forward to 2007 and I’m still in London, at a seminar about buying property in Melbourne (I was planning the move home and thinking of buying a newbuilt apartment.) I started talking to one of presenters who asked where I lived. “Chelsea? I used to be an estate agent there. Whereabouts?” I named the street. “Not number 18? I sold that for you!” Turned out she was the estate agent my ex had used six years before, now working on the other side of the world, and she even remembered the details of the sale, which I hadn’t got before. Now that felt like a small world!
SalBug says
I’ve got two small world stories.
First one is that my high school Wnglish teacher attended a meeting at my company – we’re talking 200 miles away from where I went to high school, and 20 years after I graduated! Too weird.
The second is that the sister of my first big high school love started working at my company – and again, we’re talking 200 miles away and 30 years later! We still laugh every time we see each other in the hallway!
Kim says
It was meant to be that you and the other family meet. When it almost happened the first time, the universe must have said it wasn’t quite time!
Jenny says
Here’s our coincidence story. DH bought our house in 2001, a few months before he met me. Anyways, he bought this house and it has a one bedroom apartment above the garage. We later found out that his grandma and grandpa rented the garage apartment when they were first married.
Jen Migonis says
I love small world stories! My husband AJ and I were in Greece last summer (best trip ever… Although I wouldn’t think going now with out of control riots would be as fab) and we were at the top of the Parthenon and saw a kid that AJ taught in school that year (and we live in MA… Not exactly next to Athens).
In other news, Sherry, I totally thought of you today while I was in Home Goods and looking at the most fabulous ceramic animals. You would have died and gone to heaven!
Carrie says
I went to a thrift store in a town about 50 miles from where my family was from. The clerk kept looking at me strangely and then started quizzing me about my family when I was checking out. My grandfather died long before I was born but people say I’m a dead-ringer for him right down to the same shade of green eyes. Anyway, it turns out that her father and my grandfather were friends/co-workers. My grandfather (a truck driver) would stop at their house at the beginning of his daily run for coffee with her dad. She was a teenager and had a huge crush on him. She (ok this part was stalker-ish) even remembered the day he passed away in ’68. Small world.
Jamie B. says
I ran into a former swim team teammate at a hostel in Vienna while backpacking through Europe. Of all the gin joints …
Sally says
I live/work in NC, but moved here from MD. I was chatting with a new co-worker recently who moved here from NY. He mentioned that his grandparents lived in the same city in MD and he grew up going to visit them there.
What neighborhood?
Same as my house in MD (my first baby). Cool.
What street?
Same! And the street is only three blocks long!!!
What house number?
SAME!!!
Ok, next day he tells me he was off by one number, so they were actually one block away. Still, we have life experiences on the same street.
nadine says
i live in Richmond NY (staten island) i grew up on the small street (12 houses) that my (much older than me) husband lived on as a 1 year old. he also returned to the block in his 20’s as BFF to my next door neighbor. and was there like every day for years. we never noticed each other! staten island is so small but with a 500,000pop. everyone knows everyone.
MAC says
I went into my regural salon, and my hairdresser had called in sick. The salon said, we have a new person that just started today, do you want to use her? I said sure, well I sat down and we talked for a few mintues about my hair and how to handle it. She started cutting and we started making small talk, she had just moved up from Houston (TX) to Fort Worth, She had just moved into a house, I said me no, she said I live at “Mustang XXDX” addition, I said so do I, she said i live on Wild Stallion Road, I said me too. turns out we lived about 5 houses from each other. That was 5 years ago and she is cutting my hair since then. She quit that salon and now cuts from home.
Jill says
A few years ago my husband and I and our good friend went out in Tulsa, OK for a few drinks. Since we were going downtown, we decided to be responsible and take a cab.
Our friend is Syrian, specifically from Damascus and when we got in the cab he noticed the driver had a Syrian accent. After talking for a few minutes, our friend found out that the cabby not only was also from Damascus but that the cabby actually knew our friend’s family. That’s a SMALL world!
Kate says
You may have covered this already, but what’s up with the switcheroo on pillows? Looks good!
YoungHouseLove says
That’s in the post here (down by the close shot of Burger in front of them): https://www.younghouselove.com/2011/06/twenty-yards-o-fabric/
Hope it helps!
xo,
s
Kristen Graddy says
I met my current beau (E) back in high school when he dated one of my friends, and I was dating her cousin. I didn’t know until much later that the two guys met when they were ten years old and both living in CA, at a motocross race. It wasn’t until E and his family moved to a small town in AR, and he was calling all his friends-prefacebook days- that he found out his racing buddy had already moved to the same little town the year before! Or that they would fall for the same girl at different times in their lives for that matter!
Jenni says
I probably have more relevant stories, but it’s funny that you mention crazy-random happenstances today.
So, a couple of weeks ago, our 89 year old landlord gave my husband 20 dollars to buy some beer for our fourplex, in order to bribe us all to put together a picnic table he bought for us, and to have apartment ‘bonding time’. (We all thought that was pretty funny. My husband is a beer snob, so he took his job seriously ;). We have met our neighbors before (I mean, after a few years of living here…lol) but never really chatted. Tonight we finally got around to doing it, and we found out that one neighbor is the music director for the church that some of our friends go to. We have been to that church on occasion, but rarely go anymore because it’s pretty far away in a different part of the city. (And not a small city either–the metro area is about 3.5 million people). We also found out that his wife works at the neighborhood co-op that we like to shop at sometimes. (We also realized that we tend to run into each other lot more outside of the apartment!)
Jenny says
Okay, here’s my small world story. I lived in Indiana when I was little kid. I later moved to Virginia, and when I was 16 years, I met a few people from North Carolina at a camp one summer. One weekend, I drove down to NC to visit and I found out that he had lived in Indiana, and we used to play together when we were three years old. I even found a picture of us in the bathtub together at age 3. Small world! Two years ago I got a random FB message from him asking him if I was getting married. I was taking my bridal photographs and his grandmother was living across the street from where I was taking the pictures. Talk about small world!
Lindsay says
I’m from South Dakota, so everyone has stories like this. It’s pretty easy in a state with only 800,000 people.
One story I have is that when I liked YHL on Facebook, I found out a friend of mine was already a fan too! Small world indeed.
Ginny-Beth says
I work in higher education, and we are always saying what a small world the field is. Like last year, I had just moved to WA for a new job, but had quite a few colleague-friends at other schools in the area. One invited me to attend a regional conference and since I was new to the area (read: it’s was on the Oregon Coast) I was down.
Being a singleton at the conference, my friend who invited me asked me to join his school and their 7 other delegates for dinner. I jumped in the car with his new supervisor, Susan, sitting next to me in the back seat. We commented on the weather being chilly and she mentioned that people always worried about her in the cold being that she was from FL. I said, no way, I’m from FL. I asked where she was from and she said the east coast and she went to Stetson University. I said, no way! My grandparents worked there for 30+ years and my mom and uncle both went there. This time she said no way! She asked my mother’s name and I told her.
TURNS OUT…. she was my mom’s sorority big sister. NO WAY!
We called my mom and the two of them caught up for a while. Everyone else in the car was flabbergasted like we were.
I love a small world story.
Cara says
My husband and I met via Craigslist, despite living within 15 minutes of each other for most our teenage years. On our second date, we discovered that our respective families had swapped houses between Camas, WA and Washougal, WA in 1989! My maternal grandparents were looking to move to a smaller home closer in, and his family of five was looking for a larger home and acreage out in the country. The icing on the coincidental cake: I’ve also lived in both houses for short periods of time (as a toddler in the Camas house for a year and for a month at age 11 at the Washougal house). Sadly, my grandparents have both passed on and my husband’s parents sold the country home 10 years ago. We do have plenty of photo albums to peruse when nostalgia strikes!
Theresa P says
A little over a year ago we found out our new neighbors actually were the ones who bought my and my husband’s old condo. They had a few more kids and lost the condo in the bad housing market then moved right next door to us in our new home that my husband and I bought after selling the condo! We had never met them but we put two and two together after they described the condo my husabnd had completely renovated himself! I pulled out the paperwork and their names were on it! Small world.
julia says
So many! Mpls is notorious for such things.
After looking at a Craigslist apartment (and meeting my two potential roommates), I called my boyfriend to excitedly describe it/them and he realized he’d been standing in line behind them for tickets at an event the night before (I’d arrived late and missed them).
When one of those strangers-turned-best-friends was moving in with his girlfriend, the address of his awesome new digs sounded familiar. Same duplex where my mother lived for a few years.
My first Etsy sale was to be sent to an address that sounded familiar (*that* starts sounding familiar!). It was the home that my grandmother was born in and my mother was born in (and married from).
Those’re my big recent-ish ones.
kathy says
Thanks for posting the link to your post that included your other home’s original owner. Her letter and photos (!) were really a great gift. Somehow I missed that blog post over the last few years that I’ve been following YHL.
I’d sure love to know some of the past history of my 1930s home. One of our older neighbors told us that our street used to be a stream of water where he fished as a boy! Our area is called “Riverview” and there’s supposedly a lot of underground water pockets around here, so I guess it could be true. Weird and interesting!
Angela B says
I grew up in a tiny town in South Australia. It has a population of 60. I’ll call it ‘X-Town’. Most people in our state haven’t even heard of it. When I was 8 my parents took my brother and I travelling around Australia for three months. We were in a restaurant interstate and my mum started talking to our waitress. The waitress asked where we were from and my mum replied ‘South Australia’ and then added ‘Outback South Australia’, which was weird because she had never added on the ‘outback’ bit before and at least half of our state is outback anyway. The waitress paused and then asked ‘X-Town?’. Turns out she knew a guy whose parents had lived in our town.
dinah says
THANK YOU SO MUCH
for sharing this insanely cute dog video.
Totally brightened up my day.
Bryony says
I think my best small world story is this:
1) My mom remarried about 4 years ago, when I was still in college. This added 6 step-siblings to our family.
2) I went abroad to England for a semester and met the guy who is now my husband (complete with super-cute accent).
3) My brand-new step-bro spent two years doing missionary work elsewhere in England (around the same time I was there).
4) A guy my step-brother was best friends with during his time in England turned out to be one of the guys living with my husband just before we got married and got our own place.
We’re still surprised at how that one worked out.
Cassie says
Hi
LOVE LOVE LOVE your blog!
Im from Brisbane Australia, so its not small town but sometimes feels like it. Whilst at uni I worked at a coffee shop with a friend name Bec. I had picked her up droped her off numerous times. Then I met my now fiance whilst working at the coffee shop (Bec was there that day) after one or two dates, I went to his place for a movie night.
The name of the street seemed familiar and the number seemed familiar but it wasnt until I pulled up in the house next door to Bec’s house did I realise they were long time neighbours!! A few months later I was working in a new organisation (approximately 10,000 employees) and Met Bec’s Dad.
Also before our first couple date with my best friend and her boyfriend, I was given the run down of information to my partner. When they arrive my partner had actually met my best friends boyfriend. They had work together and have uni classes together!!
So this has got me thinking, how crazzzzy would it be if someone I know is read this. Hola out if you do!! Small world!