I too was raised in New Hampshire and couldn’t wait to leave. But every time I see those New Hampshire hills, my heart does a little jump. New Hampshire’s gentle beauty is not in my pantheon of most spectacular places ever, but to me it might as well be the font of all beauty in the world because it shaped my imagination. I will send you a photo.
Something always jumps out when I read you Betsy. E.G. ‘For him, it was not only a way to settle in a place that was more like his home in Italy, it was a new start for the sons and daughter who returned damaged in ways visible and invisible by the war.’ Is such a story too close to home for you to explore? I can hear you telling it now…
Ask me where I am from? and I will say ‘Wembley’ and leave it at that. I expect the world to know where Wembley is. I left there aged 22 and moved 4 miles to Harrow so we could buy our first house. At 25 I moved 115 miles to Birmingham because of work, and at 31 love took me to Mansfield (we are still together). At 35 we moved to Nottingham to be near a railway station, and at 70 we ‘downsized’ to Beeston, two miles from our old house and all of 123 miles from Wembley. Every one of these places fed me history and memories I think of as my own. A bit like you and your husband, I find it difficult to tell my story without telling Susan’s.
For the record four of my closest friends are from my Wembley ‘Young Socialist’ Years. None of us go back. I have one cousin in the borough and my maternal grandfather died in 1976. Just a couple of visits since then. I love everywhere I have lived for different reasons.
It is a rich farrow you plough this week, but then when don’t you? Keep up the good work Betsy.🐰
From the time I could read, I knew I wanted to travel. By 7th grade, I knew I would leave home, and I never planned to return to that small town in Missouri. I was born in the country, but I'm a city girl at heart. I've lived in seven states, but it is Oregon that I call home, and where I've spent most years. I love visiting Missouri, my sister, and the land itself. When I visited the property where my grandma and grandpa lived in rural Missouri, I felt a physical connection to the land. Missouri has the birds I love, and all the seasons. But Oregon always calls me back.
Since my parents were divorced when I was two, I've always been straddling two homes. I've grown comfortable with being a transplant in some ways, or rather, a nomad. I grew up in a small town in N. New Mexico, whose stark beauty I miss occasionally, but my career life has been in NYC and I've always made an annual trip to visit my father in my birthplace of Santa Barbara. Now I'm dividing my time between SoCal to live with my senior mom (dad is gone) in Ojai and my daughter, who still lives in NYC. NY is a place that I love/hate. Love the culture, the random mix of humanity, my friends, my work as a Teaching Artist. Hate the weather, danger, stress, grime and noise. The lack of green spaces and the distance from wild nature. So, SoCal: My mom has a lovely little house in cute Ojai. But when I go over to visit or work in Santa Barbara, I really feel that is home. My feelings are very mixed. I adore every nook and cranny of the Old Downtown where my father always lived. I don't want anything to change. I miss him so fiercely. I long to stay close to the cool beach. But the place has changed greatly. It is so expensive that many of the old guard of artists and free-living people can no longer afford to stay. It has become a playground for ultra-wealthy transplants and I have no desire to know most of them. One can go back in place, but not in time. I and SO miss my Dad.
“all the things that my 17-year-old self longed to escape now draw me.” This resonates. My story is similar to yours. I left home at 17, lived in New Orleans for four years at college and then moved to Baltimore and later DC where I was still a few hours from my parents. Then, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin for two years, and lived super close to some family on my husband’s side. Then, we moved west to Spokane where we are now plane flights away from everyone. During Covid, being on the west coast was a blessing and an ache. Our daily lives were better because of our access to nature and the outdoors, but planes were not possible for awhile and that brought all my decisions under a microscope. I’m headed east today to NY, to crawl into the snail shell and slither around.
Loved reading this, Betsy. It brought back many memories of my own life - To escape being drafted to go to Vietnam, I joined the Navy at age 19, I grew up in the South Carolina Lowcountry where mulitple generations of the same families lived within a few miles of each other.
Since leaving, I have lived in nine different states and three European countries. I loved the cultural experiences of living in every one of those places, but I always considered myself a South Carolinian no matter where we lived.
Finally, in 2011, we moved back to SC, living in the Midlands until I retired and now live in the Upstate region. We are within 300 miles of where I grew up and visit the Lowcountry frequently, but I've outgrown it.
I was born in Tarentum, PA, near a steel mill. It boasted a white population, with conservative values and too many churches. I left at 17 (Army/Europe) & when I returned the town looked miniscule. I left the area a second time during my first year at Westminster College & hopped a plane to CA, & never looked back.
Each time I return to PA to visit Mom & a few siblings, the town appears more deserted; stores are boarded up (a pizza joint and a medical office are the only stores operating in the small shopping plaza near my childhood home). Tarentum resembles a ghost town; it's depressing.
I do miss the autumn (I visit for my mother's b-day in October) and the changing glorious colors.
California (San Diego) has been my home for over 50 years & I am still in love; Tarentum was just the place of my birth.
I moved to the northern UK from Spain a year ago for love. It's hard for me to imagine this place will ever feel as much my home as my hometown does. The weather, language, food & cultural differences are sometimes too much to bear.
This early-morning read really hit home (no pun intended). I grew up in Houston and couldn’t wait to exit the city and state, which I did as soon as I could. That lasted about 25 years, when, thanks to my husband's job (which has taken us around the country and the world), I found myself living in Austin. The state is worse in many ways (the extremist politics, the weather, etc) than before I left, but when my father got sick during Covid (cancer), I was grateful to be close enough that I could jump in the car and be in Houston in 2 1/2 hours. Austin isn't home, and Houston hasn't felt like home in a long time. I guess what I lost all those years ago when I left was the sense of "home." It used to be rooted in a place – where I grew up, where my parents and childhood friends were – but over time, with all the moving and leaving of places, it became about where my husband and kids were. Now the kids live elsewhere, and “home” has become the times we’re together (trips, holidays, surprise visits, phone calls, FaceTime, etc). For Dorothy, there may have been no place like home, but for me there’s no “place” called home.
I left my home in NH at 16, thinking I would be away for six months. I have lived in the northern region of whatever state I lived in:Kauai (the northern most island in Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest and Northern California . It has been my dream to return to New England my entire life—home, the setting in my dreams at night, was always here. I returned 7 years ago, changed in ways I could not have imagined. The small city I am from is not the one I left. I am a different woman, yet still the same wide eyed girl, reaching for adventure, still filled with memories, disappointments and gifts, and new dreams and new directions that pull. But I am rooted here, and I always have been.
I admire people who search for home. It feels brave to me that people make major shifts for the benefit of their own lives and are not held back by obligation. We often stay places for everyone and everything else but ourselves. There are beautiful places everywhere with new people and places to discover that we never try because of the comfort of the familiar. I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I want to make the best of where I am but do believe there is better elsewhere. In the end, I think I’ll favor contentment and invest in where I am, no matter how incompetent the state government is. 😉
Have you read Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake? I just finished it—my cousin told me to—and there is a lot in it that touches on how place, memory, and home are interwoven concepts. As someone who went west and then returned to New Hampshire, I have felt the pull of both home and away. So much has to do with family. But not all.
I never really had a “hometown.” I started elementary school in Orange, CA and moved to Scottsdale, AZ where I finished grade school and started high school. I finished high school in Centerville, OH, and went to college in Alabama, which I will NEVER call home even though it is where my parents grew up and our ancestors lived for many generations. Going back to any of these places just feels weird - empty, sad, foreign, disconnected. Hometown is a truly foreign concept to me, and I have always felt I’m missing something by not having deep roots anywhere, even though I have a wide network of roots in so many places.
Your poll is so fascinating. I find myself in the minority living about 50 miles away from where I grew up. And somehow, I'm the sibling who lives farthest away from our parents and the house we grew up in.
When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get away from my small town. I knew with great certainty that my life would not...could not start...until I left. I went to college 10 hours away. Got my first job 7 hours away and it was at that point that I started to realize that I didn't want to be that far away. My nieces were growing up without me. I was missing out. So I moved closer, but not back to my hometown, which would have been difficult, anyway, given that I'm in academia and your choice of where to work is a little more limited.
Now I live about an hour and fifteen minutes drive away, which has turned out to be a very good distance. Close, but not too close. But I also live in a town that is very much like the place where I grew up, but is NOT the place where I grew up. This feels like the best possible scenario. I get to enjoy all the small town-ness that I love, without actually having to run into that person from high school in the grocery store, which I find horrifying. I love where I live, but I also don't feel smothered by it, which I think would have happened if I'd moved back to my hometown. On top of all that, the town where I grew up has changed so much, I wouldn't be moving back to the same place, anyway.
Thanks for sharing your Spark, Elizabeth. You made me write this morning and recently, only the NYT has been able to do that. It's funny, because of my strong feelings I had recently been thinking a lot about your subject.
I too was raised in New Hampshire and couldn’t wait to leave. But every time I see those New Hampshire hills, my heart does a little jump. New Hampshire’s gentle beauty is not in my pantheon of most spectacular places ever, but to me it might as well be the font of all beauty in the world because it shaped my imagination. I will send you a photo.
Something always jumps out when I read you Betsy. E.G. ‘For him, it was not only a way to settle in a place that was more like his home in Italy, it was a new start for the sons and daughter who returned damaged in ways visible and invisible by the war.’ Is such a story too close to home for you to explore? I can hear you telling it now…
Ask me where I am from? and I will say ‘Wembley’ and leave it at that. I expect the world to know where Wembley is. I left there aged 22 and moved 4 miles to Harrow so we could buy our first house. At 25 I moved 115 miles to Birmingham because of work, and at 31 love took me to Mansfield (we are still together). At 35 we moved to Nottingham to be near a railway station, and at 70 we ‘downsized’ to Beeston, two miles from our old house and all of 123 miles from Wembley. Every one of these places fed me history and memories I think of as my own. A bit like you and your husband, I find it difficult to tell my story without telling Susan’s.
For the record four of my closest friends are from my Wembley ‘Young Socialist’ Years. None of us go back. I have one cousin in the borough and my maternal grandfather died in 1976. Just a couple of visits since then. I love everywhere I have lived for different reasons.
It is a rich farrow you plough this week, but then when don’t you? Keep up the good work Betsy.🐰
From the time I could read, I knew I wanted to travel. By 7th grade, I knew I would leave home, and I never planned to return to that small town in Missouri. I was born in the country, but I'm a city girl at heart. I've lived in seven states, but it is Oregon that I call home, and where I've spent most years. I love visiting Missouri, my sister, and the land itself. When I visited the property where my grandma and grandpa lived in rural Missouri, I felt a physical connection to the land. Missouri has the birds I love, and all the seasons. But Oregon always calls me back.
Since my parents were divorced when I was two, I've always been straddling two homes. I've grown comfortable with being a transplant in some ways, or rather, a nomad. I grew up in a small town in N. New Mexico, whose stark beauty I miss occasionally, but my career life has been in NYC and I've always made an annual trip to visit my father in my birthplace of Santa Barbara. Now I'm dividing my time between SoCal to live with my senior mom (dad is gone) in Ojai and my daughter, who still lives in NYC. NY is a place that I love/hate. Love the culture, the random mix of humanity, my friends, my work as a Teaching Artist. Hate the weather, danger, stress, grime and noise. The lack of green spaces and the distance from wild nature. So, SoCal: My mom has a lovely little house in cute Ojai. But when I go over to visit or work in Santa Barbara, I really feel that is home. My feelings are very mixed. I adore every nook and cranny of the Old Downtown where my father always lived. I don't want anything to change. I miss him so fiercely. I long to stay close to the cool beach. But the place has changed greatly. It is so expensive that many of the old guard of artists and free-living people can no longer afford to stay. It has become a playground for ultra-wealthy transplants and I have no desire to know most of them. One can go back in place, but not in time. I and SO miss my Dad.
“all the things that my 17-year-old self longed to escape now draw me.” This resonates. My story is similar to yours. I left home at 17, lived in New Orleans for four years at college and then moved to Baltimore and later DC where I was still a few hours from my parents. Then, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin for two years, and lived super close to some family on my husband’s side. Then, we moved west to Spokane where we are now plane flights away from everyone. During Covid, being on the west coast was a blessing and an ache. Our daily lives were better because of our access to nature and the outdoors, but planes were not possible for awhile and that brought all my decisions under a microscope. I’m headed east today to NY, to crawl into the snail shell and slither around.
Loved reading this, Betsy. It brought back many memories of my own life - To escape being drafted to go to Vietnam, I joined the Navy at age 19, I grew up in the South Carolina Lowcountry where mulitple generations of the same families lived within a few miles of each other.
Since leaving, I have lived in nine different states and three European countries. I loved the cultural experiences of living in every one of those places, but I always considered myself a South Carolinian no matter where we lived.
Finally, in 2011, we moved back to SC, living in the Midlands until I retired and now live in the Upstate region. We are within 300 miles of where I grew up and visit the Lowcountry frequently, but I've outgrown it.
I was born in Tarentum, PA, near a steel mill. It boasted a white population, with conservative values and too many churches. I left at 17 (Army/Europe) & when I returned the town looked miniscule. I left the area a second time during my first year at Westminster College & hopped a plane to CA, & never looked back.
Each time I return to PA to visit Mom & a few siblings, the town appears more deserted; stores are boarded up (a pizza joint and a medical office are the only stores operating in the small shopping plaza near my childhood home). Tarentum resembles a ghost town; it's depressing.
I do miss the autumn (I visit for my mother's b-day in October) and the changing glorious colors.
California (San Diego) has been my home for over 50 years & I am still in love; Tarentum was just the place of my birth.
I moved to the northern UK from Spain a year ago for love. It's hard for me to imagine this place will ever feel as much my home as my hometown does. The weather, language, food & cultural differences are sometimes too much to bear.
This early-morning read really hit home (no pun intended). I grew up in Houston and couldn’t wait to exit the city and state, which I did as soon as I could. That lasted about 25 years, when, thanks to my husband's job (which has taken us around the country and the world), I found myself living in Austin. The state is worse in many ways (the extremist politics, the weather, etc) than before I left, but when my father got sick during Covid (cancer), I was grateful to be close enough that I could jump in the car and be in Houston in 2 1/2 hours. Austin isn't home, and Houston hasn't felt like home in a long time. I guess what I lost all those years ago when I left was the sense of "home." It used to be rooted in a place – where I grew up, where my parents and childhood friends were – but over time, with all the moving and leaving of places, it became about where my husband and kids were. Now the kids live elsewhere, and “home” has become the times we’re together (trips, holidays, surprise visits, phone calls, FaceTime, etc). For Dorothy, there may have been no place like home, but for me there’s no “place” called home.
I left my home in NH at 16, thinking I would be away for six months. I have lived in the northern region of whatever state I lived in:Kauai (the northern most island in Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest and Northern California . It has been my dream to return to New England my entire life—home, the setting in my dreams at night, was always here. I returned 7 years ago, changed in ways I could not have imagined. The small city I am from is not the one I left. I am a different woman, yet still the same wide eyed girl, reaching for adventure, still filled with memories, disappointments and gifts, and new dreams and new directions that pull. But I am rooted here, and I always have been.
I admire people who search for home. It feels brave to me that people make major shifts for the benefit of their own lives and are not held back by obligation. We often stay places for everyone and everything else but ourselves. There are beautiful places everywhere with new people and places to discover that we never try because of the comfort of the familiar. I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I want to make the best of where I am but do believe there is better elsewhere. In the end, I think I’ll favor contentment and invest in where I am, no matter how incompetent the state government is. 😉
Have you read Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake? I just finished it—my cousin told me to—and there is a lot in it that touches on how place, memory, and home are interwoven concepts. As someone who went west and then returned to New Hampshire, I have felt the pull of both home and away. So much has to do with family. But not all.
I never really had a “hometown.” I started elementary school in Orange, CA and moved to Scottsdale, AZ where I finished grade school and started high school. I finished high school in Centerville, OH, and went to college in Alabama, which I will NEVER call home even though it is where my parents grew up and our ancestors lived for many generations. Going back to any of these places just feels weird - empty, sad, foreign, disconnected. Hometown is a truly foreign concept to me, and I have always felt I’m missing something by not having deep roots anywhere, even though I have a wide network of roots in so many places.
Your poll is so fascinating. I find myself in the minority living about 50 miles away from where I grew up. And somehow, I'm the sibling who lives farthest away from our parents and the house we grew up in.
When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get away from my small town. I knew with great certainty that my life would not...could not start...until I left. I went to college 10 hours away. Got my first job 7 hours away and it was at that point that I started to realize that I didn't want to be that far away. My nieces were growing up without me. I was missing out. So I moved closer, but not back to my hometown, which would have been difficult, anyway, given that I'm in academia and your choice of where to work is a little more limited.
Now I live about an hour and fifteen minutes drive away, which has turned out to be a very good distance. Close, but not too close. But I also live in a town that is very much like the place where I grew up, but is NOT the place where I grew up. This feels like the best possible scenario. I get to enjoy all the small town-ness that I love, without actually having to run into that person from high school in the grocery store, which I find horrifying. I love where I live, but I also don't feel smothered by it, which I think would have happened if I'd moved back to my hometown. On top of all that, the town where I grew up has changed so much, I wouldn't be moving back to the same place, anyway.
Thanks for sharing your Spark, Elizabeth. You made me write this morning and recently, only the NYT has been able to do that. It's funny, because of my strong feelings I had recently been thinking a lot about your subject.
https://youtu.be/huj2zoz3oPg?si=EA-diuoBr_2BhyVh
"Who will watch the Home Place?"