Where I'm From (with apologies to Joan Didion)

my backyard in summer; photo credit Rudd Crawford

Ohio -- for me -- has always been a place of stark color and beauty.  In the winter, we are encased in bleakness:  grey sky, brown trees, white snow, frozen mud.  Every now and then there is a snowstorm, and we live in a world of swirling, shimmering whiteness.

I hardly ever get to see Ohio in the summer anymore.  I have childhood memories -- riding my bike on the old railroad tracks, catching fireflies, falling in the creek next to my house, playing planet tag with the King Street crew -- but mostly what I think of when I think of Ohio in summer is a lush green, green everywhere and on everything.  Sometimes even the sky seems green.

(Usually, though, that's right before a thunderstorm and then you push your luck, staying outside for one more berry to pick, one more game to play, one more dance at Illumination, one more adventure to have, and then CRACK, you hear the first peal of thunder and you're running as fast as you can for shelter, laughing with the friends and strangers who are running with you, and the rain starts to pelt down and it hits your skin like bullets but the air is still warm and for some reason the discomfort is good, amazing, and you reach home or the bandstand or the library or Gibson's Bakery and stand there shivering, soaked through, and you grin so wide you think your face is going to fall off.)

(I used to want to get married in a thunderstorm.)

Ohio in December

Right now the sky is a bleak gray.  There's part of me that's disappointed, of course -- sunny July days in Ohio are kind of the best, epic on a Ray Bradbury scale -- but I also love the summertime gray.  I think it's because of how flat the land is.  When you drive down the highway, the steel-gray of the upside-down-bowl sky matches the pavement-gray of the highway, and the only color you see is a green band of trees and grass all around you, a vibrant, mossy belt that seems to be holding you in place in the midst of an enormous gray void.

Our house (still our house to me, even though I haven't lived here in eight years) is an enclave in the wilderness.  It is quiet and safe here.  In the winter you see nothing but white outside, and in the summer you see nothing but green.  All you can hear at any time are the birds and the creek rushing by.  Every now and then the sound of a car's motor slides by, but it does not startle you; it is a merely a temporary intruder.

As an adult, I can and do stay here without venturing outside for days on end: curled in an armchair reading, or listening to music, or chopping vegetables for my mother.  Sometimes, though, I take my mother's bike and I ride around the town.  I go past the high school, I race through Tappan Square, I pedal as hard as I can down the hill on Groveland Street so that I can coast all the rest of the way to our house.

All of this, and I think, this is home.  Oberlin is home, and it will always be home.  But then I wake up with Macklemore's "My Oh My"in my head and I hear it later at the Slow Train Cafe with my mom and I become confused, disoriented.  I feel a flush of pride for Seattle even as I vividly remember the American League Championship game that Cleveland won over Seattle, sending us to the World Series, remember the elation my parents and I felt as we watched the Indians gleefully jump all over each other, remember feeling slightly sorry for the other team whose heads hung low, remember screaming with happiness with my friends that WE were going to the World Series.  And then, when the Braves beat us in the end, I was crushed.  Angry.  But still proud.

There in the Slow Train, I hear "My Oh My."  I hear the same series from Seattle's point of view, and I feel happy to be from Seattle.  And I wonder: can I really belong in both places?  Do I belong anywhere?  I look at Seattle and I think:  my city.  I look at Oberlin and I think:  my town.  I claim them both as my own, but would either of them claim me?  I haven't been a part of Oberlin in so long.  New buildings and businesses spring up.  Old ones disappear.  I don't recognize the kids lounging, swearing, and smoking in front of Gibson's.  I don't know anymore whether the Indians are having a good season, and I wonder how anyone could wear a baseball cap with such a horribly racist mascot on it.

And in Seattle, I am forever the transplant, the bumpkin.  The mountains hem me in, beautiful as they are, and I ache for the flat stretch of Ohio cornfields and the way the sky becomes a concrete part of the landscape.  I don't go hiking because the Northwest's harsh wilderness seems like it's trying to shrug me off, shut me out; instead I stay in the grit of the city and I feel lost there.  Suffocated.  My Northwestern friends have their own patois, their shared stories: songs from summer camp, the '01 quake, That One Time We Lost The Sonics, how their parents built Seattle and Tacoma, made planes at Boeing, worked the forklifts at construction sites, wired all the buildings with electricity.  I have no such concrete attachment to this place.  My bones aren't in this city.

At the same time, though, I feel such a fierce affinity for both Seattle and Oberlin.  I am proud of my two homes.  I think of the dancing at Illumination and the dancing at the intersection of Pike/Pine after Obama's first election in '08; how in the summer the waters of Plum Creek turn lazy and Mount Rainer rears up against the brilliant blue Seattle sky; the electric energy of Oberlin High School's hallways and Thomas Jefferson's non-hallways.  

So these places are the same to me.  They are made of joy and daring and a creative and vital spark, and I am drunk with love for the both of them.  It's not an unthinking love; I know their limitations and the ways in which I do not fit with them.  I know their differences.  But they still make me feel a romantic love of place: a sort of reckless, unconditional pride.  A luckiness, that I got to be a part of both of them.  And that love, that pride, that sense of luck?  Perhaps they earn me a sense of belonging.