Finding Myself in a New Hometown

Hometowns are more than a Mainstreet and a local grocery store, library, and park. Hometowns are places we never walked alone. We step in time with the past, so the future can step to its own throbbing rhythm, a rubato undulating with life. Where we built friendships, shared memories of parades, birthdays, and football games, heart-stopping snowstorms, and floods. Those are the memories that over embellish tiny spaces into larger-than-life experiences.

My hometown changed over time. Never keeping my feet in one place. I went from city to country to farm fields to forest, from deep snows and below zero winters to gentle dustings and impressive humidity and heat, drylands to spongy grounds. Boating along scenic Lake Michigan's beaches, standing on the edge of an ocean to watching over the Mississippi's angry waters. Every place has its own beauty, good and-interesting.

It isn't just the views that make a hometown home; it's people who walk city streets and open spaces, planning, changing, at times, fighting to leave things as they were. The souls of those long since gone can still be heard in the deep silence of a snowy night, others in the fury of a summer storm. My hometown is this planet; I stopped to rest in this place, acknowledging that rest is fleeting while open spaces call to me. Hidden corners draw me into ancient secrets, like the yellow butterflies of Gabriel Garcia Marques imagination, where hometowns flutter on the edge of now and then until, in my universe, they blend into four-lane streets buzzing with energy.

In my wanderings, I ran into the best people, getting lost while looking for something else. I remember stopping for directions somewhere in Arkansas. I took a wrong turn that took me into a conversation with a local working at the only hotel's hospitality desk in town. She was on her break; we stood outside the front entrance, shaded from the hot sun by a porte-cochere, staring across an empty, dusty road we spoke of places still begging to be seen. Every once in a while, she drew in air from the pencil she was chewing on. I was sipping on bottled water; both of us kept brushing away strands of hair, trying to escape.

As a kid, I walked along Canal Street in Chicago. Surrounded by cement and winds gusting around buildings, updrafts from metal gratings housing a screeching subway. With my nose pointed upwards, enamored by the top of the buildings, I nearly ran into a moving car. I was pulled back by my father, who laughed, "keep your feet and nose in the same place; you'll see more, safer too." I never understood how I could see more standing still.

Years later, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I walked my elderly mother around a soon-to-be-retired Victorian bed and breakfast in the process of downsizing. We talked to the owners; they were retiring to Florida, as local ghosts tromped above us with honest hatred of change. I bought a rose-pink wine goblet I use as a water glass. My mother said she was dying and didn't need anything.

A couple of weeks ago, in my new hometown, I stood on a bridge between two states, held up over the raging waters of the Mississippi, and nodded behind my mask to a man with a mask who walked two tiny unmasked wiggling Yorkies.

Another man breezed past on a bike. On its rear rack, he had tied down a picnic basket. Its front basket was holding water bottles. He rode that bike from one end of the bridge to the other and back again. By the time I reached the halfway point and decided to head back, he was on his third center run; each time he passed me, I had to step to the side. Closer to the low rail and the heady drop to the churning rapids roaring under the bridge. As he passed, I reclaimed my walking path dead center on the walking bridge and sidestepped a neat pile of scat.

Fearful of the open spaces. Battered with biting cold winds, I held my ground. Wind in my face, turning me towards the edge, I acknowledged my fear of heights and my ability to sink like a stone. Cold rains misted over me. My nose, fingers, and toes frozen, hovering sixty feet above a raging river, I held my hands up as if I were on a rollercoaster ride on this path before there ever was a bridge, I called out to everyone. I am here!

This place is part of a forest with its heady smell of trees and mud, decay and growth, a wild mix of dirt, gravel, asphalt, cement, and neat lawns. Nature's chaotic growth encroaches along the edges of gravel roads as humanity counters with gas stations, laundromats, and restaurants. For today, this is my hometown. I grab a journal, pen, and cell phone, time to get to know my neighbors.