The question of my hometown is not a straightforward one.
I was born, and spent the first several years of life, in South Florida. Big city suburbs grown out of almost forgotten 1950s towns. My parents divorced, and mother moved my sister and me back to my grandparents’ house in North Florida. A doublewide deep in the scrub with a sugar sand yard and miles of skinny pine trees in every direction. We spent three or four years there before my mother remarried and we moved elsewhere in North Florida, where we lived in a fixer-upper while a new house was being built on nine acres in some more woods. There were no neighbors to speak of. My friends were a bb gun and the oak trees I would climb in the hopes of finding a way out, back to my friends in the city. The only thing I could see from the top was more trees.
With a population of ten thousand people, it was a relatively small town, the interstate almost perfectly bisecting it. Thirty minutes from anywhere a teenager might want to go. All the people I went to high school with had already known each other for a decade, families intertwined and property lines shared. They were good, nice, southern people, but I was not of them, and I was convinced I never could be, no matter how deep I put roots down there. I tried to make the best of a situation I didn’t choose. I did varsity sports, went to school events, worked on a farm in town for my summer money.
This is perhaps why I joined the military. I wanted to be a part of something from scratch, rather than getting to the party late, entering the play after the first act. I enlisted two years after high school, eleven years ago. I still keep in contact with a half dozen people from the military. I talk to only two people from high school - one of which is my wife. When people have asked me where I’m from, I generally just say “Florida.” If they ask for specifics, I will tell them a medium-sized city near where I lived.
Between my adolescence and the military, I moved a lot. After my service, my wife and I moved even more - and we are planning on moving again in less than a year. Following opportunity until our feet are tired. All told, Something like ten times in twenty years. The question of my hometown became smaller and smaller until I never thought about it. It had no bearing on the geographic trajectory we wanted for our life. At the time, we scoffed at people who graduated high school and never left, convinced, as many young people are, that small towns are for retirees and good-for-nothings only.
My parents now live elsewhere on considerable acreage in a house they had built. Idyllic pasture surrounded by imposing oaks. It’s beautiful. At night, a man can see so many stars. But it still isn’t home. Were I to ever inherit and live in it, I would feel akin to a foreigner at Ellis Island.
Even now, my wife and I live in a small college town not unlike where we grew up. And we enjoy it, would raise our children here, be a part of something here, rather than just passing through.
At least once or twice a year, when we are in Florida, we make a point to drive through that small town. I say boomer-type shit about how it’s growing so quickly, how it “isn’t what it used to be” - - even though I spent a decade trying to convince myself I didn’t give a shit what it was, is, or would become because it was an irrelevant footnote in the book of our life. But in my heart, I am seventeen again, driving my mother’s old minivan to work after school, counting dollars and days until I am gone for good. Driving too fast down dirt roads, blasting music my parents didn’t otherwise allow me to listen to. Measuring my freedom in gallons of gas.
We have taken the long way around, now peering down sparse county roads out of intrigue rather than indignant obligation. As we coast into middle age, we desire some dirt of our own, away from interstates and malls and most other things. A hometown for our children. Perhaps one they won’t have the urge to leave so quickly.
Beautiful
As a kid who moved a lot when he was younger, I understand the feeling of shallow roots, and especially looking down on people who never leave their hometowns. I never wanted to live with my parents or in my hometown all my life, much as I loved them. I think the bustle and grind culture that encourages people to go far away for happiness doesn't always give happiness in the end. Instead you feel like a stranger in every state and every town. No place is ever truly "home"; it's just another place to be.
How long can you live that life before it's over? At what age will you wake up and realize all those towns you lived in your life were, for some small stretch, home?