Homecoming
Who says you can’t go home? harmonize Jon Bon Jovi and Jennifer Nettles in their duet of the same name. They croon about the heady experience of goin’ back to the place where one comes of age. But Kent Haruf writes darkly in Where You Once Belonged about a hometown hero who returns to his stomping grounds to wreak havoc. Homecomings. Nostalgic? Strange? Or turbulent?
I am on vacation this week in Iowa. While short on major attractions (which is fine) and long on corn bursting from fertile ground, we come because our families live here. Central Iowa is home. But it is a home that has become nearly unrecognizable. Since my husband and I flew the coop many years ago the landscape has changed remarkably. Office buildings and state-of-the-art grade schools have risen up nearly as fast as the corn and soybeans. Our little berg, once a snoozing cow town with a grain elevator and corner bar, now boasts a gourmet grocery store (and the same grain elevator now in sore need of a paint job). Landmarks from our childhood have been swallowed by thriving progress.
It doesn’t look, or feel, like home anymore.
Can any of us really go “home?” The place where we first played “King of the Mountain” on the snow drifts, attended our first “mixer” and graduated high school is, in societal terms, called our “hometown.” But like the evolving landscape of those places from whence we came, we grow and change from life experiences, and that “home” becomes more a nostalgic state of mind and less a reality. We may even leave the very place where, as the Bon Jovi/Nettles song goes, “they call me one of their own.”
And perhaps that’s it. We may not belong anymore to the community that raised us. But we belong to it.
And how true that seems as I show my kids the grassy spot where my first grade classroom once stood (the building was condemned and torn down), the gymnasium that used to have a stage at one end (the very stage where I met my future husband and their father), and the house I grew up in, repainted and now dwarfed by the curbside trees. As I take them down memory lane, along that path lies a nostalgic piece of community history. The reminiscence of “remembering the town when” before the transformation. We pass our recollections along, with pride, to our kids. And that’s pretty cool.
Although much has changed, the place I once belonged still has church ice cream socials. With homemade ice cream. The local big band provides the entertainment and my high school math teacher is still in the saxophone section. I took my kids a few days ago and loved that we could experience a taste of “home” together.
And then there was my class reunion, a milestone year. Attending was truly like coming home…falling into conversation after so many years with the people I grew up with. Picking up where we left off as if no time has separated us. A true homecoming.
