Going Home, and Returning There
“There’s no place like home.”
“Who says you can’t go home?”
“Home is where the heart is.”
Where you once belonged.
In song, on the silver screen and in narrative, home is a nostalgic subject. Home can be many things…a state of mind, the place we lay our heads every night, or who we are with. What it means to one can mean a very different thing to another.
Since I left nearly 30 (30!) years ago, I have called my hometown home. As we pack our bags, it no longer confuses my children when I say we are going home to visit family. They know it means not only the place their beloved grandparents live, but also the place their dad and I grew up. Home is our “stomping ground,” and our family. It’s the right place to be. What’s more home than the people who love you unconditionally and know your full life story? Nothing. They no longer live in the homes in which my husband and I grew up, but curling up on the couch in our “Walmart” clothes after a meal of chicken and rice and icebox cake, well, that is home at its best.
But still, every time we visit I say to myself, this is where you once belonged. I don’t return in the manner of former star athlete Burdette in Kent Haruf’s book of the same name, instead I feel like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole. It’s all so different. The usual landmarks, like the golf club and the cemetery in the middle of the road (really, no kidding) are camouflaged by crops of housing developments and fast food joints. Some familiar places no longer exist, like the elementary school I attended for five years (condemned and demolished) and the Casey’s General Store where I spent my allowance on fudge-flavored chewing gum (transformed into an insurance office). My hometown has grown from barely 3,000 people when I graduated high school to nearly 18,000. I return, and feel like an anthropologist on Mars.
As author Emma Donoghue recently wrote in Real Simple magazine:
Moving to a new place also makes you realize what’s vivid–by comparison–about where you usually live.
Wow, how true. The dry air, elevation and all the mountains of Colorado have to offer seem a far cry from the relatively flat green carpets of corn and beans in Iowa. But what I love about the home of my childhood comes into sharper focus. For one, how many college sports fans wear their pride and colors, the designer license plates for Iowa and Iowa State with their barely decipherable alphabet soup, like “3SMLHWKS.” It took me a few to read that as “3 small Hawks (Iowa Hawkeyes).” There are so many of these plates that people have to get creative. And the sunsets. The sunsets. And seeing the dozen jet streams criss-cross a clear blue sky (when the ubiquitous clouds of winter finally part), the alternative beauty mountains can and do obscure.
There are also some similarities. My hometown has a mining history. When my daughter and I visited the local library we took in the modest but well-done museum filled with relics from the time of the coal boom in the early 1900’s. We circled the displays of sepia-toned maps, my daughter tried out the old-fashioned school room desks and later deduced that the coal car in the exhibit held actual coal. But what got my attention was the photograph taken at the turn of the last century of a familiar three-story brick building, the middle school I attended many decades later. It still stands in the middle of town, not alone on a stretch of flat rich soil but surrounded by trees that were just beyond the sapling stage when I was a kid. The building is no longer a school, but there it is…familiar, but changed. It still belongs in its own way.
This icon of my hometown is symbolic. No, this old school can’t spread wings and go out into the world, but it has new purpose and remains relevant to the place it has stood for over a century. It still belongs, and like it, we belong, too. Whether we move away or stay, we gather new wisdom and experience and enjoy a new purpose and place. As I muse about this school, and my hometown which has boomed into a nearly unrecognizable state, I realize something: we have grown together. We are old, longtime friends. And always will be.
The grain elevator. Let’s face it, it’s an eyesore. Except at Christmastime when a star is placed at the top, something the Co-op has done for decades.
