You, your home town, and coming full circle.

In My Humble Opinion
1

Lately my wife and I have been discussing life, and how we have come full circle in the last 30 years. Both of us are in our mid-thirties, we were born and raised in New England among the old stone walls, 18th century houses and farm lands, fishing villages, and traditions. Growing up among the harvest festivals, fish markets, town meetings, holiday lights, and four distinct seasons made us appreciate the cyclical nature of our corner of the world. In our late teens, early 20’s growth became more important and we both needed to spread our wings. Both were in grad school here in NE, but after which we both moved away, out west.

I was drawn to the mountains and vast open expanses of the western frontier and she was drawn to the left coast by the sea. Respectively we both spent a few years out west but were both drawn back into the New England lifestyle and what I know now as the New England culture where seasons and change mean something more than just temperature differences. However, it is now during this time of reflection [Ok, I’m snowed in with the rest of coastal NE] that I am looking at this geographic locale and see that many of my early childhood friends are also moving back.

So I ask - the teeming millions. Did you bond with the place you were raised, or did you leave and never look back? If you did leave, do you ever wish to go back to where you are from? Do you have a special relationship with your birth locale? If not wht not?

2

Like you, I moved around a fair bit in my twenties to see the world, but I came back to Saskatchewan because it just feels right to me.

However, I have a love-hate relationship with that clearly defined four season thing you mentioned: Christmas Shopping at 40 Below. HO, HO, HO!

3

We are in the middle of the cycle.

I was raised in several different unremarkable towns throughout Southeast Michigan, but I didn’t find my ‘‘home town’’ as such until I went to college in Ann Arbor. My parents ran a small business there so from a young age I have always known Ann Arbor was my destiny. I lived there for 6 years as a student and now, whenever anyone asks where I’m from, I tell them Ann Arbor. None of the other places matter. Ann Arbor, my City of the Trees.

We are now living on the East Coast. We are young and we are still discovering this country. He’s a grad student in New Brunswick, I work in Manhattan. It is a completely different way of life, one much more frantic and visceral than what I experienced in Michigan. Maybe I will go to grad school in New York City, maybe I will go in Philadelphia. Maybe I will do my MSW in NYC and my Ph.D. in Philly, or vice-versa. I’m going to spend another four months in Mexico this summer. I’ve considered the Peace Corps after my MSW. I still have a need to travel. There is so much life we haven’t lived, so many places we haven’t seen.

But someday, I want to go home. When the Great Michigan Depression is over, when people can be reasonably certain of job stability, when we have our degrees, maybe then we will go home. I will be able to walk the paths of the arboretum, cut across the Diag to State St., eat once a year at The Chop House (or maybe more often if I get a good degree.) Maybe I’ll be able to help rebuild Detroit into something stronger and more diverse than ever before. Maybe he can work at the University. Our future is built on a cacophony of maybes, and fortunately for me I have the ability to find contentment no matter where I am geographically–but my hope is that we can go back.

Michigan is where I am from, the land of the sweltering July heat and the five-month winter. I know the trees, which creatures you’ll find if you kick over a rotted log in the woods, the way you smell autumn before you see it. I know what Michigan dirt feels like because I rolled around in it a thousand times during my childhood. I thought the lack of real snowfall out here would be an exuberant experience, but I forgot that with every snowfall comes the memory of every snowman I ever made, of wading knee-deep to the bus-stop with a mug of hot cocoa in my hands, of school cancellations and skidding off the road sideways and everything it means to have a familiar sense of belonging. I miss my Winter, for Christ’s sake.

Much as I find them interesting and engaging, New Jersey’s streets are not my streets. Last night I was feeling frustrated and depressed, and had the desire to jump in the car and drive, turn left out of the driveway instead of right, go far away from the city, where the trees hang like a canopy over the back roads, drive for miles past the farmhouses and cornfields and get myself good and lost in some backwoods town.

You can’t do that here.

Someday we will come back home and the circle will be complete.

4

I could never move back to the City of Flint, MI. (That last link is especially personal for me - the minister that was shot the night before Thanksgiving was a friend of mine.)

5

I’ve come close to closing the circle, but not quite. . I’m from the East Side of Cleveland, but moved first south and then west over the years. Colorado, in particular, felt like home to me for a long time. But for employment reasons we now live within six hours of Cleveland once again. I find myself very much at home when we go back to visit my one cousin there: my original childhood home, the last homes of both of my grandmothers, the cemetery where my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents are buried, and the home of my aunt/uncle are all within a few minutes of his house. Going for walks is great when I’m there.

But to address the OP’s point - I think in my case only part of it is cultural and/or environmental; the other part for me is that, having lived in 9 states (three of them twice now), anything that counteracts the rootlessness I’ve felt as an adult is a welcome thing.

I’ll never close the circle at this point. My wife hates the cold and snow and needs sunshine. So returning to Cleveland is out, even though I’d return in a heartbeat.

6

I moved to Colorado in my early 20s, but it never felt like home. I’m a midwesterner, despite the fact that I fucking. hate. winter. Culture, family, and friends are all here. I’d like to be in a position to winter somewhere less harsh, but the Chicago area will always be my home.

My brother, on the other hand, moved to Colorado about 6 months after I did and except for my mom’s funeral, he hasn’t been back. After nearly 30 years, it’s his home.

7

There are times I’d like to go back; I miss the ambience of where I grew up.

But the truth is, even if I could move into my chidhood house, the ambience today is different from what it was then.

Some places change faster than others, and SoCal has changed a great deal in the almost 40 years since I left.

But no place, even a New England village, is unchanged.

My wife grew up in a small (<500 people) village in Connecticut. It isn’t any bigger today than it was then. Almost all the buildings today are the ones from back then. Which were 30-100 years old then. But little of the ambience is the same. It used to be a place where minor-league fat cats had their summer places. Now it’s just the working poor of minimum-wage America. It used to be full of kids. Now it’s full of Social Security recipients.
Bottom line: Sorta like “you can check out but you can never leave” in reverse, the reality is that each of us can “return to our roots but never really get there”.

On a gross scale you can go back to the weather & much of the geography. You can even go back to some of the architecture. But little or nothing of the social environment still exists. And certainly none your role in it as a child, teen, or young adult would accept you back, nor would your current personality find comfort in it.
Life is a journey through Time, and Time does not have loops, returns, or do-overs.

8

I grew up in a recently-built suburb in northern VA and couldn’t wait to get away to a place with more character and more history. So, after the usual bouncing around associated with a fledgling career in academia, I ended up in smalltown Mississippi – which has character and history, for sure, but not much of anything else.

When I went to visit my parents for Christmas, almost the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, and it was like walking out of a sensory deprivation chamber into the bright sunlight. (My God, all those different kinds of bread! The seafood! Palak paneer at the hot bar!)

I don’t know. I don’t want to move back to my hometown, particularly, but I’m thinking that I would gladly move back to the DC area – or almost anywhere else vaguely urban and vaguely diverse. Or maybe I just want Mississippi to get a bunch of immigrants and much better supermarkets. I’m not sure which.

9

I grew up in the south Bronx in NYC. I think that most of that area burned down in the early 80s when people were torching all of the old buildings so I couldn’t go back if I wanted to. I left as soon as I was old enough to go to college and never looked back. You’d have to be full-tilt nuts to want to go back to dangerous slums. I ran out of money and ended up on the west coast after traveling around the country for a while and I liked it so much here that I stayed. My partner is from a reservation in North Dakota and although he doesn’t want to go back to reservation life he misses the wide open spaces that he grew up in.

10

I am very passionate about Ohio, Northeast Ohio and my hometown (a small suburb right inbetween Cleveland and Akron). I’ve traveled a bit along the East coast and have never found any place that suits me better.

I love this place so much - this neighborhood - that I bought a house down the street from my parents and across the street from my high school. I plan to live here for a long time.

This neighborhood is like that, though. When I was growing up, there were 4 sets of parents and children residing in 9 of the neighborhood homes. Now there’s a new generation of us doing it. There’s me and and two others, and I talked to another girl who hopes to raise her daughter here.

There’s just something about this neighborhood that makes people want to stay, and I think that’s awesome.

11

Wouldn’t want to go back to the town where I grew up. If I weren’t heading Swedenward in the next couple of months I might consider the area around where my maternal grandparents lived; I’ve got more genealogical than personal connections there so it wouldn’t be like going back but building something new out of older material.

12

I love my home town, it is truly my home.

When I was a teen, I talked a lot about wanting to “get out,” but honestly, I was the least contemplative teen in the history of humanity, and I said that mostly because that’s what everyone else was saying. Had you asked me why, I would have had no particular reason. I went to college at the other end of the state (from Buffalo, to New York City). Right after college, I got a fantastic job in the city.

But I still missed home. I started telling people that I was planning to move back home next year. And I still said that the next year, and the next. I am extremely fortunate to have had a great job that turned into a career I was passionate about, and I felt very strong ties to that as well.

After about ten years of this nonsense, and continuing to love my job while missing my home town, I said to myself “Self, there’s a reason you work for a living – why not spend your money on something that is going to address this problem?” and so we bought a small year-round house in the Buffalo area, right on Lake Erie and we spend holidays and long weekends and summers there. Yes, I vacation in Buffalo NY, which sounds like a bad joke, but it is paradise to me. Best money I ever spent. And we have plenty of visitors from the NYC area who are amazed by how nice it is. I love having guests and changing their perceptions about Buffalo.

My coworkers in NYC joke that I am the only person they know who commutes from Buffalo to NYC. One advantage of this is that it has made me much more familiar with the other parts of NY state in between, and I am a huge cheerleader for the state in general, not just Buffalo or NYC. I will also talk your ear off about the awesomeness of the Great Lakes.

13

I think that there is a grain of truth in what LSL is saying but I feel he is exaggerating a great deal. I too am from a small town in CT and like the OP have familial roots that run deep throughout New England. It has been my experience that the culture of the place, is of course so different in different places. But especially in rural areas, there is a, for lack of a better word, Yankee-ness that has transcended the dilution of the rural way of life and still exists. Now I am a Bay Area resident for the better part of twenty years, and the cultural differences are profound. I still feel and see them. I am fond of saying I did not know I was a Yankee until I moved to California.

I will say it is much stronger in the older part of the population. I visited a old pal in Burlington VT two summers in a row a few years ago. Both years there was an old lady at a farmers market who sold pie and fresh doughnuts she had fried up early that morning. I will never forget the taste of those doughnuts. And I know once she, and I guess there must have been other old ladies at other farmers markets, stopped selling them at those farmers markets they will be gone forever. But what a powerful link to the past they were.

That is an extreme, and too poetic, example, of course. But what I am trying to say is that I do not believe that weather and geography are the only indicators left of New England culture, by a long shot. Slide by Angelo’s Orchid Diner in New Bedford MA. There are people there who sit at the same spot at the counter and comment on the same things their parents did, have the same conversation with the counter lady, order the same Portuguese specials. They are not all old folks by any stretch of the imagination.

I could come up with a hundred examples, in every state. I spent a bunch of years in Worcester and Amherst MA. I have good friends and family in each New England state.

It just occurred to me. The blue collar population is much more inclined to cling to cultural benchmarks, it seems, than the white collar folks. A broad generalization, sure, but largely true none the less.

I’d like to hear others’ take on this.

Regards,
Soul Brother Number Two (kidding!)

14

Did you bond with the place you were raised, or did you leave and never look back? If you did leave, do you ever wish to go back to where you are from? Do you have a special relationship with your birth locale? If not why not?

I left and never looked back. But I hated my home town; it was like a Stephen King small town. Small, but not nice.

However, at 43, I’m tired of traffic, people, rudeness, crowds, and other urban issues. Small town life has its appeal again. And I find that in my writing, characters and settings are moving back to a town that’s an amalgamation of the small home town I hated (lived there until grade 11), and the one where we lived for grade 12 and college, first year. Subconsciously, something in me is longing to return to the Kootenays.

Of course, I’m nostalgic for a lot of other things these days, too–the past is starting to take on that golden patina of being “better” than today. I could dig out my teenaged diaries, though, and I bet after that, I wouldn’t go back in time for anything.

15

Oh, my. I grew up in NJ; I promised myself I’d never, except under dire circumstances, move back to the “northeast” (quotes to signify the swath running from around DC up to Boston; I don’t think I’d mind ME, VT, NH, or even upstate NY).

It’s painful enough to visit relatives that still live in the area. The thought of moving back there, even semi-permanently, is the stuff my nightmares are made of.

16

Absolutely. I was born in Ventura CA, although I didn’t live there full-time until I was in my 30’s. Most of my best childhood memories are there as it where my grandparents lived. I was a Navy brat and we moved all over, so Ventura was as close to a hometown as I had. I finally got a job there in the '90’s and lived there unitl my husband’s career took us away.

I really do like a lot of things about the Des Moines area - I have friends, love my job, have a decent little house (a virtual impossibility for us in Ventura), and even like the seasons, except on days like today. But it is always in our minds to go back there in a few years. Call of the native soil and all that.

17

I didn’t really like the town I was born in, but I do love living in Mississippi. I left once, during my youth; I hitchiked to California and lived there for two years. When I came back, I stayed.

I live in the central part of the state now, and the city I live in is part of the Jackson metro area. There’s enough ‘big city’ close by that we have access to some of the nicer things (better supermarkets, as Fretful says :wink: ) but close enough to the country that you can drive for 20 minutes and be surrounded by pasture and woods.

My husband is one of those folks who still live on ‘family’ land. Other than a year or two living in ‘town’ (during his first marriage), he’s never left this 20 acres where they lived when he was born 50 years ago.

We want to retire back to a more rural area of the state eventually. But I don’t think I’d ever leave again. I joke that if I go anywhere, I’m going to New Zealand.

18

I’ve come full circle.

I left my hometown in the UP of Michigan when I was seventeen, spent a couple years in Minneapolis, a summer in Greece, and then ended up in and around Boulder, CO for eleven years.

I started getting homesick about two years in to the Colorado experience. By the time I set up my life in a way that let me move back home, I was so longing to live back in the UP that the tiniest things made me miss it. I remember looking at the weeds that grew up between the cracks of the sidewalk and thinking they are the wrong weeds, I want UP weeds, not Colorado weeds!

I also longed for seasons. Sure, the mountains in Colorado get good winter, but not the front range.

I’ve been back here for 6 years, and it’s great. Mr. Athena, though not from here, loves it as well, snow and all. We’d take a pretty big dip in our income before we’d consider moving.

That said, the Internet helps a lot; living in a small, isolated town without a link to the outside world might get a little too insular. Not to mention it allows us both to work and make a living doing what we’re trained in (high tech/software) even though there’s absolutely no call for our skills locally.

19

In high school I wanted nothing more in the world than to get out of this shitty little town. I went to college in Atlanta, learned that this shitty little town is actually kind of great, and moved back.

20

I left and never looked back. A place is just a place for me and it is the people who make a difference where ever I go. There’s no one in my home town anymore that I care to see.