Born in Nebraska, grew up in Kansas, went to school in northern Indiana, living in Indianapolis, spent summers in Wisconsin.
Trader Joe’s? Check. Got one 5 miles from my apartment.
Bitter cold winters? Check.
Lack of hills or elevation of any sort? Check.
Frozen custard? Check. It’s not Gilles, but it’s close. Ritter’s.
Lake Michigan? Check. 3 hour drive, but it’s close when I’m in South Bend.
Kringle? Sadly, no.
Adding another to the list: football. Seems to me that people outside the midwest just don’t know how to do football games properly (with a possible exception made for the South).
I miss trees. Yes, there are trees in Colorado, but not like home, where if you don’t want a tree to grow in a place you have to keep pulling them up.
I miss lakes, ones that occur naturally, and rivers.
And lightening bugs. It makes me sad that my kids don’t know how to catch them and put them in jars. We may have to stay with Grandpa for a summer just so they can learn.
I miss autumn and all the wonderful things that come with it, like burning leaves and pumpkin patches and changing colors. I especially miss the Scarecrow festival.
Sweet corn and, absolutely, tomatoes and all the rest of the wonderful produce that comes out of the ground in the midwest.
I am back to living in the Midwest, but sometimes I miss the Great Plains where I grew up. I know some people find the landscape stark, but I love the fact that the land is so flat and you can see the land-sky horizon for almost the full 360 degrees when you’re in the country. Even the corn is beautiful, when the fields seem to be a sea of endless green. I feel like I can really breathe there, like there is room to think. It’s humbling in a different way than the oceans or mountains are humbling. It’s the good earth.
And we could keep this thread going for days on local foods:
Cotton Club ginger ale
Chicago-style hot dogs
fresh sweet corn
deep-dish pizza
brats
Little Kings
The smell of burning leaves in the fall.
Interrobang – when I moved to Chicago from Cleveland it took me years to get used to the idea that the lake wasn’t north of the city. Geographically, I’d always thought of Chicago as being at the bottom of the lake; in Cleveland the lake is always north.
Mooney252 and Leifsmama really struck a chord. Real trees, real lakes, lightning bugs, real tomatoes, pizza, European ethnic food. ::sigh::
[hijack] I grew up in Chicago, and that really messed me up when I lived in San Diego. In all my 11 years there, I always had to think about compass points. A big body of water was supposed to be East, dammit. Going away from the water was heading West. Just goes to show you how messed up those folks in SoCal are![\hijack]
That’s so funny! Though I’m not having trouble with where the water should be (there’s not much water here,) I now have trouble knowing which way I’m going if there are no mountains to guide me!
For the first two years we were here in Boulder, my husband kept referring to the mountains as North. Never could figure out how that happened. He seems to have them correctly oriented now.
Was in the West (Boulder, CO) for 11 years. Now am back in what some call the midwest (UP of MI), and it FEELS SO GOOD!
Things that make me happy all the time:
1 - MOISTURE! I know people bitch about humidity, but here in the UP it rarely gets hot enough for humidity to be uncomfortable. The bone dryness of Colorado made my skin crack and peel, my lungs rasp, and I just generally hated it. Give me moisture any time!
2 - TREES! As other posters pointed out, if you don’t want a tree to grow somewhere, you gotta keep pulling 'em up. I love the forests in the summer, with their mossy, muddy feel. I love snowshoeing in the winter forests, with the trees standing like sentinals.
3 - GREEN! Things are green and lush here in the summer. Moss grows everywhere. The forest floor is covered in ferns. Life is good.
4 - SNOW! People might disagree with me on this, but I hate hate hate the brown winters that are common in the west. It’s just so ugly. Give me nice white snow any day.
5 - LAKES! Big lakes, small lakes, streams, rivers. Lots and lots of natural lakes, and a few “basins” developed for industry but useful for recreation.
6 - NO PEOPLE! This is the best. So many parts of the midwest are incredibly beautiful and incredibly underrated. People wonder all the time why I moved from what’s been rated one of the best small towns in the country (Boulder, CO) back to the northwoods backcountry of the UP. It’s because it’s BETTER here. Not only is it beautiful, the cost of living is low and it’s uncrowded and pristine. I can go for hours through the woods on my bike or hiking, or on the lakes in my kayak, and see nobody. I see wolves and deer and coyotes. I see kingfishers dropping from branches like a rock to fish in the lakes. I see blue herons and hawks. What I don’t see are Eddie Bauer-clad yuppies out on days hikes.
Ah, yes. Squeaky cheese curds. Washington seems to consider itself a dairy state, but I cannot quite buy that claim when squeaky cheese curds are almost nowhere to be found. (Only place I’ve had them: on the WSU campus, where they make fresh ice cream and cheese.)
Mooney252 and OldBroad – it took me several months to get used to the idea that big water = west, not east. Plus, you can’t really see the Pacific from Seattle proper anyway, unlike Lake Michigan in Milwaukee.
I’ve been through dozens of tornado warnings; I’ve seen the aftermath.
But I’ve only seen one tornado in 40+ years of living in the Midwest. It was captivating in a devilish way.
But weather systems can be fascinating. I’ve been sailing out in front of a fast-moving cold front. I’ve seen 12" of rain in 10 hours, something that would drown “rainy” Seattle (it pretty much did the same to suburban Chicago).
I’ve flown around chimney-shaped cumulo-nimbus that rose 30,000’ but were only 5 miles in diameter – so it was sunshine all around but pouring buckets out of the bottom of the clouds.
This thread is really beautiful. Much of my life I’ve been made to feel like I’m sort of of hick for living in the midwest, someone who is really missing out on the good things and utterly out of touch with what’s important.
Ha.
Of course, now I’m homesick for cornfields and the smell of manure and farm market reports on the radio each day.