Fewer than 2000 people. I grew up on the east side of town with nothing but wheat fields past the backyard. Sometimes when there was no wheat growing, hot air balloons would land a quarter mile off, and I would walk out and watch the pilots(?) get them folded up and ready for ground transport. Supposedly has a Native American enchantment on it that it will never get by a tornado and never has been though there have been close calls. Next door neighbor was an older couple. The husband had a black walnut tree that would drop tons of nuts on his yard that he would have to clean up with an frozen orange juice can attached to the end of a broomstick, and he had tamed a squirrel enough to the point that it would ride on his shoulder, and he would hand it a nut every now and then while working. My brother and I got a great job in middle school by being set up by my dad. He asked me one summer what I would think if he bought us "a little motorcycle." By that, he meant a mo-ped. I was ambivalent as cars and bikes weren't my thing, but he bought one, and had us ride it in the backyard (we lived on just under an acre) for a year. Then one day I come home, and there's another mo-ped, and Dad is putting large wire baskets on them. Turns out, we're going to be paperboys. Town had three paper routes, and my brother and I had two. Got up at 3, 365 days a year, worked for an hour, and went back to bed. Cops didn't care that we were illegal drivers as the W brothers were good kids. Even though it was cold, and we often hit ice patches, December was the best month because we would get a lot of tips - both monetarily and in the forms of baked goods from customers, and then delivering early Christmas morning was kind of magical because everyone left their house lights on, and it was just your mo-ped's engine interrupting the cold stillness looking at lights. I would drive the whole town. When I (the last kid) graduated high school, mom, grandma, and my aunt moved further south to a town close to mom's even smaller hometown so grandma could be closer to "the farm" that was still in the family.
Don't often go back. I was a super-student nerd, and I only had two really good friends, both were more popular than I was, and one of them was a Greek Adonis who could have dated anyone he wanted to, but like me, he wanted out of the town. We've grown apart, but the non-Adonis still lives there. When I do go back, I try to first head through my undergrad, which my Adonis friend's parents also went to and fell in love over eating German potato salad from a local chicken restaurant, and I'll pick them up a couple of pints. They eat it like ice cream.
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