A sense of place

An ode to home

Today’s accompanying tune: “The View Between Villages” by Noah Kahan

I’ve been so lucky, so fortunate, to have loved everywhere I’ve lived. There haven’t been many stops, I’ll say, but enough to know what makes a place home, what place has the potential to become home if I just let it. It’s not a formula, as much as I’d like it to be, nor is it strictly a vibe. It’s something in between, a balance I’ve learned to calculate as I ricochet between suburbs, cities, small towns, and everything in between.

My hometown was a small suburb an hour outside of Chicago. It was nothing particularly special — two large eight-lane highways dissected our relatively small enclave along dubious lines, ensuring the renters and the apartments were contained in one section of town while the nicer, single family homes gated themselves in another. Ours was somewhere in between, without much of an identity in a town that only cared about defining itself as an other. I grew up in the 90s, and my experience was exactly what you are thinking — riding bikes around the neighborhood with the other kids, no phones, home before the street lights came on. Teaching my brother to play basketball on the neighbor’s driveway hoop. A cul-de-sac where everyone knew everyone, yet no two houses looked the same.

At the time, it felt small. Contrived. I yearned to leave, to experience the city, which I had deemed more exciting simply due to its size. I was tired of the strip malls and fast casual restaurants and the way I could never sneak someone over when my parents were away because one of the neighbors would surely call them when a car parked out front that wasn’t theirs. I didn’t want what my family had — few friends, struggling to survive financially but always willing to keep up with that week’s Joneses, no interest or curiosity in the world outside their bounds. The place itself was, and will always be, hard to return to simply because of their relationship to it and to me. My physical home was not a home, not for me. The place was combustible, chaotic. Full of unspoken expectations and silent treatments when those were not met. Escaping, making it out, was the only goal I had.

The schools were good, better than some of the well-funded schools we played against in sports and whose fans taunted us with slurs in the stands. Our town believed whole-heartedly in access to education, regardless of the language children spoke at home with their families or their immigration status. When schools in Chicago closed due to funding cuts, the students came to our school. We had the resources and the adults cared, for the most part. School was never contrived, our community never small. So, though the town itself never felt like home, not truly, the school was. The only thing I ever wanted from it, was more.

I moved to another Chicago suburb for school, this time close enough to the city, to the allure of its size and community, to warrant stops on Chicago’s main transit line. I wrote my application essay about Chicago, how badly I wanted to be a part of its community and its life. How I was intertwined with it in ways usual — sports teams, school field trips, popular attractions — and not — my town’s name, for one, is simply a directional derivative of the city. It won over the administration, though I’m glad I don’t have a copy to look back on.

It wasn’t a college town — you were just as likely to see families with young kids as folks that simply never made it out. Retirees ate at the Chili’s next to a group of international students from the university. But oh, the lake. The lake that glistened, shone, sparkled on the best of days. Became moody, stormy, fraught on others. The rocks generations of students had painted cropped out, sheltering the grass from its changes. The beach that was, somehow, never open, not officially, but became a late-night haunt for many as spring wrested its power over Chicago’s brutal winter. The wind howled, mournful, through the buildings erected at various stages of the university’s growth, brutalist structures dwarfing the ornate Victorians of an earlier era. Here, the community was never the other students, nor the professors. All too preoccupied with themselves, their futures as doctors or lawyers or politicians or CNN anchors. An accumulation of wealth so head-spinningly glaring I simply averted my eyes, chose not to see. Students who had never worked, would never work. Students I served as a waitress in one of three jobs I juggled alongside the course load. Professors that sucked up to students simply because of who their parents were.

No, the community there were those of us that found each other. Those of us that worked, had loans, were the first in our families to leave. Those of us that ordered one large pizza and lived off of it for a week. Those of us that did our best to pad our resumés, sure, but wanted a break, just a small repose, from all the seriousness surrounding us. Those of us that walked in those bitter winds in the depths of winter to and from class, to and from work, to and from Burger King. And when the sun finally hit the lake and it shone as brightly as newly shattered glass, we saw it. When the trees began to bud and the grass finally outwitted the snow, we felt it. It was ours, this place, so harsh. So obviously not meant for us. But still, we had made it ours. Together.

After graduation came the drive out West. The promise of another city, one on a hill overlooking the ocean. That glint of the lake, so promising and full of hope? Multiply that by some incomprehensible number, and that’s the Pacific Ocean on a good day. I’d taken a few internships in San Francisco before graduation and decided unequivocally that Chicago would have to wait. San Francisco was it. My first apartment was simply a room in some woman’s house, fully furnished. Then I moved into a house share with tens of other people hoping to make the city their home. Then, into a real apartment overlooking the freeway in a dull yellow building. Next, a duplex, painted a deep blue. It had a yard and a parking spot and not a single door that closed or locked. Buses full of tourist drove past, groaning up the hill, iPads snapping photos of Oliver perched in the window looking out onto the street. Then, the last apartment, the one famous for its role in a movie long since famous next to the park. The top of the city. Views into the Bay, views of Diablo Peak and Mount Tam and a parking spot. The lack of air conditioning and South facing windows, baking in the heat of the day. The emails from building management reminding everyone to mask up in hallways, in elevators. The washing machine that ate a comforter. The dog that lived below us that feuded with Oliver over a single pee spot out front.

As I sunk further into the city, into its rhythms and quirks and well loved bits, I again found community. Not the tech employees — though I did my best to conform to their requirements, to no avail and no long-standing career — but the others, the folks that had lived in the city for decades and had seen their fair share of booms and busts. The folks walking dogs at the park, the people selling weed in the park, the neighbors, the corner store owners. The coworkers that became friends after one happy hour too many. The hills, the parrots. The raccoons and coyotes and sea lions. The way people back home rolled their eyes when I said I loved San Francisco, loved every broken part of it. I loved the billboards for unheard of tech companies and bus wrap ads for cryptocurrency. I loved the house a block away that decorated for every holiday, regardless of how niche. I loved the way my legs ached as I walked an unrelenting hill home every single day. I loved how the light hit the hills as it sunk into the water at the end of each day. It wasn’t mine, but I was its.

Then, the desert. An escape from the noise and bustle of the city that had prepared me, unknowingly, for the next chapter. It was quiet, still. A place to retreat, to collect my thoughts. What had I been doing the last several years? What was I working towards? What did I want? Was any of this real?

I got every answer, including ones for questions I’d never thought to ask. I settled back into myself as I settled into the desert, with its extremes and love for life. I watched the doves nest on the patio, watched the tortoise emerge from its burrow. I smelled the creosote after the first rain and watched the Joshua trees bloom. A place finally meant for me, at this time and this point in life. A place content to let me sit and be, content to let me wander its back roads and explore its rock faces. A place so fully of a place, but never of a people, of a time. It will be here, exactly as it was, so long after I’ve gone. It waits for the next person seeking its solace, its wisdom. The next person leaving one love in hopes that this place may love them back. I can tell you, with enough time and attention, it will. It surely will.

That’s the thing with home. Home is, truly, a result of my actions. I know certain things — the formula portion of this equation — that I need: access to the outdoors, reasonable weather most of the time, people who value what I value. But there are other things, things without name or reason, that plant me in a place. A local bar, a well-traveled trail, a teacher, a beach. There is no manufacturing this, no way to rush it. No way to make it so with grit and determination. It’s that wow factor, the something special, in ways big and small. The family of doves, the iconic Joshua tree. The iconic bridge, the way the fog rolled over the park but stopped before the building. The lake, the walk in the snow late at night when the world was quiet. The school, the oak tree. But in the end, I wanted to be there, to be a part of these places’ long and robust history. They gave me so much; I’ve learned more in each move than I ever could had I stood still. All, with a purpose, a lesson to pass along. I hope, one day, I will have done each of them proud.

Even if they don’t remember me, I will always remember them.

Here’s to our old loves, the ones we know so deeply and yet know we must leave.

- Megan