Nic Narrates

There’s something about returning, if only for a day, to my once upon a time hometown. I’m one of the few who got out and, with my parents relocated, I’ve long since stayed away. But driving up the street of the neighborhood in which I grew up, it did something to me when we brought the car to a stop at the curb of my childhood home no more.

Over the green expanse, there sat the front yard climbing tree still looking climbable, there the bay window Mom would clamber through after a quick pop of the screen when locked out of the house, there the rose bushes school dance pictures were taken in front of, the backyard pin oak I planted from a seed that’s grown taller than the roof, and the cul de sac where the neighbors would gather to chat and keep an eye on the horizon as springtime tornado sirens blared. There sat all the convoluted histrionics of my memory. All that a childhood home comes to signify. The tiny fiefdom of family life.

But for all that, the door stood tightly locked against me and I held no interest in ringing the bell. Instead, we continued on down the street my brothers and I once raced our bikes along, past the sledding hill, and the neighbor’s backyard in which I broke my collar bone one summer. So much of what I saw felt so familiar and yet off. The town and everything in it was the same and not all at once.

Here still were the soybean fields and the knee-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July cornfields. Here remained the two-screen movie theater that once had been a church, the brick paved streets, and the Victorian mansions intended for families no fewer than 12. And here the old railroad depot- my first gateway out of town to places anywhere but here.

All around me the bubble in which I grew up, sheltered from all that seemed foreign and exotic about a city life I have since come to know and love, was alive and well. In returning to it, I realized I never could have appreciated my hometown as I do now if I hadn’t left. And I never could have appreciated urbanity had I stayed.

There may be no home for me there anymore, no more holidays there with family or friends, no reason to return really except…

There’s something about the art of remembering where I come from, of idling at the curb, and then finding myself content to drive away with the same memories and sensibilities with which I came.

Filed under: childhood, family matters, in memory, nostalgia by Nic