The Importance of Being Where You're From

A friend from high school (now almost 40 years ago) was visiting in my home town recently and I wished I was there too. His parents are both gone, but he goes to their house, the house he grew up in, to continue the process of sorting through the accumulations of their lives, and mostly, I think, to just be there.

I grew up in Russell, Kansas, and didn't think much of it while I was living there. I think about it a lot now. I moved away after college, but my mother continued to live there until last year when I moved her in with me because her memories and abilities were fading. I liked having that connection with Russell, but didn't realize how much until now, when I need to think about when to sever it. We probably need to sort her things and sell her house, but I feel an anchor there. I sensed it in the past each time I visited my mom and usually took at least one walk or drive through town, and remembered. It's not that the memories were so great, it was mostly remembering the feeling of the place - the feeling of being from somewhere, some place that was, and thankfully still is, good. It was far from perfect, and there were plenty of problems that people encountered and even made for themselves, but it was home in that slow-growing way when roots are fastening into the earth with no notice. And in so many ways, I wish it still was home. But I live somewhere else now.

I've traveled a little - more in recent years, and there are wonderful places in the world to live and to be from and places that I used to wish I had been from - places more important and interesting. But I'm from Russell, a very little town in Kansas, and it has shaped me in ways I'm only beginning to appreciate. I joked with my friend in an email about buying a vacation time-share in Russell when we thought about how reluctant we were to sell our parents' houses. I don't want to let go of the one tangible place that ties me to my town.

I'd love to go spend a season, maybe fall, walking, shopping in the few stores, visiting with people who happen to walk by while I'm on the porch, filling bags from the Farmers' Market on Saturday, sitting with neighbors in lawn chairs on Main Street to watch a movie outside the Dream Theater when they block off the street one evening in the summer.

Wine-growers say that wines carry the distinct flavor of the plot of ground the grapes grew on and the conditions of that particular growing season. I think it's true of people too. Sometimes conditions can be wonderful, sunny, nourishing; and sometimes they can be terrible, with battering abuse from storms or drought, but it affects a person's character either way. I'm from Russell, and I'm learning the importance of owning that and understanding that part of the reason I am who I am is because I grew up there. Returning to live there probably wouldn't be the nostalgic existence I imagine, so maybe the importance lies in what already happened to me there. I'm from Russell, and I'm finally so glad for it.