I never understood the feeling of loving where you grew up so much that you get the outline of your home state tattooed on your body. You know the ones with the little star in the middle, denoting your hometown? I don’t understand the lines in twitter bios that say “born and raised,” or people calling their hometown by the area code affectionately. I’ve never felt tied to my hometown. I’ve never felt an obligation to my home state.
I’m not saying I’ve had a bad experience there, because there is so much good in my hometown. I made a lot of great memories there and met a lot of great people. I’ll always remember night walks down the river walk, or standing in long lines at Frostie Freeze. I’m very grateful that I was able to go through such a great school system and I’ll always think fondly of the 18 years I spent there. But I just don’t feel any attachment at all.
I left Wisconsin pretty quickly for Minnesota when I went to college, and I honestly have not looked back in the slightest. I don’t miss my hometown at all. What I miss is the people, but they don’t even live there anymore. I’ve been able to separate the people from the place where I first met them, which still leaves me with the question: What the hell is a hometown?
I don’t think that I’ll ever really feel like I’m attached to the place I’m living in. Sure, I love Morris, but I don’t think the town is why I love Morris; it’s the people. Sure, there are a lot of really cool things about this town, but I could say that about any town. I can always recall specific fondness of a specific town. I can walk down the street and into a house and be greeted by some of the greatest people I've ever known. I can spend hours walking around under the stars of the Pomme de Terre with the people I love, or whisper criticism in a one-screen movie theater. But it still isn’t about the location.
People walk in and out of your life constantly, for better or for worse. And maybe you feel like you’re stuck in a town for an extra year, and it seems more like a jail sentence than your senior year. But, all that says to me is that we don’t make hometowns in locations, we make hometowns in people. And when people leave or when people arrive, it’s like moving all over again. You have to pack up your belongings and move into somewhere new. Thankfully, communication is really easy to maintain these days. So you’ll never truly lose the connections you have with the homes you make inside people. You can always catch up and you can always find a way to sneak back to the days and nights that you built together.
I don’t think I’ll ever get an outline of a state tattooed on my body, be it Wisconsin or Minnesota. I don’t think I could ever accurately depict where my hometown is anymore. In a few months I’ll have a couple stars in Los Angeles to go with the stars that I have in Michigan, Maryland, Tennessee, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska ... the list will continue to grow. I’ll always be proud of where I grew up. But not as proud as I am about the people who grew up with me.
