Home

A few days ago, we left Tess, Brent, and Chicago to drive our last leg on this summer journey. It’s strange that it’s all coming to a close, and even stranger to be returning to a place I call home but haven’t lived in for nine years.

In some ways I was nervous about heading back to Midland. I was one of those kids who grew up in small town America dreaming of bigger and better things and one who swore I’d never look back when I left for college. Midland was a great place to grow up, but never a place to live as an adult. I was a girl from a small Midwestern town, bound for the modern city lifestyle.

But I have missed family, and I have missed the familiarity of the region in which I grew up, and the identity and history it offers me. And yet at the same time, I still swoon at the city lights, and I am tickled by the seemingly boundless opportunities for experiencing new people, cultures, food, ritual.

Wendell Berry made a choice to return home to Kentucky after he had “successfully made it out.” He had established himself as a writer, was working as faculty at NYU, and living in one of the largest and richest cultural centers of our country. He writes about the conversation he had with his colleague who was trying to talk him out of the move.

“His argument [Berry’s colleague's] was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to. What lay behind one had ceased to be a part of life, and had become 'subject matter'…that a place such as I came from could be returned to only at the price of intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis…Finally, there was the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well…”1

I too have feared as I look for work that if I moved to Nowhere, Indiana, my life would end. Even as we toured the countryside, I battled with the tension between the deep peace I found in the open sky and intimate communities against my desire for being a part of a diverse community and for good Indian food.

But one thing has given me hope. This time, in Chicago, I didn’t get excited about the city as we drove in, and I didn’t long to spend the day exploring the sites. I missed the open sky, the pasture, and the spirit of the rural communities. I will always love the city, whether I live there or visit, but as Berry says about his move to Kentucky, wherever I am, I will not be there because of circumstance, but because I chose to be there. And with time, hopefully, I will become a part of the very fabric of the place, it’s history and rhythms. 

For now, I am home, in a place rich with its own history, and full of people who showed me love and care as I grew up. And if I’ve learned anything this summer, my hunch is that my life will not end, but instead has circled upon itself, offering me an opportunity to again commune with family and the Midwest, even if just for a short time.

1. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed: Norman Wirzba, (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint), 2002, p. 6-7.