I don't get out much.

When you have a farm and farm animals, it's hard to leave the farm. If you have a milk cow, you have to find a milking babysitter, and all of the animals need to be fed and watered, let in and out, and checked on regularly.

Aside from all that, I don't really like to go anywhere. I'm a homebody (or farmbody) and I like it here.

It's weird in other places. As in, it's flat. You can see everywhere, for miles, with no hills to snuggle you. There's all that horizon everywhere.

My oldest son enlisted in the Navy recently. Before he left, he decided to spend several months with family in Texas. He grew up in Texas for most of his life, but he'd lived in West Virginia long enough to forget about the horizon.

He called me one day and told me how strange it was, all that flatness. It felt weird to drive on flat, straight roads, and to be able to see for miles in every direction. It all felt so limitless, and not in a good way.

He'd gotten a short-term job at a fast food restaurant. When the other teenagers talked about what they were doing and where they were going after work, it seemed to him as if they were going off in so many different directions. They had no favorite places or regular gathering spots. It was nothing to hit the highway and drive 40 miles to eat somewhere or go to a mall or a movie. Flat, straight roads meant no barriers. It was easy to go anywhere - and so they did.

Listening to them talk about their after-work plans made him sentimental for home, and by home he meant West Virginia.

In our small town of Spencer, the teenagers know what they're doing after school or after work - and they're all doing the same thing. They're going to eat downtown and walk around the square then they're going to the Robey Theatre to take in a movie. They might drive around the Walmart parking lot or hang out at the park. Teenagers don't drive 40 miles in any direction at the turn of a dime around here. We don't have flat, straight roads.

I was surprised by how quickly, within a few months of leaving home, my son looked back on his teenage years here and realized what he'd had - a tightly knit community and a shared experience teenagers in other parts of the country (the flat, straight parts) don't know still exists. The disconnection from community and shared experiences was shocking to him. He missed the limits of the hills that brought people together.

My father took his first date to the Robey Theatre in Spencer in the 1930s. (Back then, 25 cents bought not only the tickets, but the popcorn and Cokes, too!) A few years ago, like his grandfather before him and all his friends at school, my son took his first date to the Robey. This year, my younger son took his first date to the Robey. The shared experiences in small towns surrounded by hills cross not only siblings and peers, but generations.

My oldest son will now see the world with the military. For many parents in West Virginia, part of our shared experience is that for various reasons our children will leave here when they grow up. But it's good to know the special sense of community and shared experience that is intrinsic to these hills isn't lost on them. Anyone who grows up in West Virginia then heads off to the limitless world soon discovers that there is no place like home.

And maybe, just maybe, someday they will come back.

Writer Suzanne McMinn lives in Roane County, where she writes every day in her blog, Chickens in the Road, at www.suzannemcminn.com.