And I would drive 12,000 miles...

“You get a lot of job opportunities in your life but only one hometown.” – Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation

As my time in California draws to an end, I’ve been reminiscing about, and admittedly looking forward to, the drive back to St. Louis.  It will be my sixth and last (at least for awhile) cross-country trip and I can’t help thinking how long ago that first day on the road with my dad feels, mile after mile in my blue Chevy Cobalt, from the rolling hills of central Missouri to the endless rows of flat land and cornrows (the vegetable kind) of Nebraska. By the end of the first day, we had made it all the way to Wyoming and the Rocky Mountains, a wide expanse of sky, cool dry air despite being mid-August, an elevation that managed to give me a bit of altitude sickness, and my mom’s hometown of Laramie.  It is the type of town and the type of land I can truly understand becoming nostalgic for, a state of mind I witnessed in my mom as we stopped there on trips three and five.  Small enough to drive around in only fifteen or twenty minutes, we stopped at the University chapel where my grandpa worked as a minister for years until moving his family to St. Louis when my mom was fifteen.  We drove past the house where she grew up, her elementary and high schools, the homes of friends she spent her time eating mud pies with, and even her “thinking spot,” which if I remember correctly, involved a large rock sitting in a vast field behind her neighborhood.  Even after all these years, I could tell this place, her hometown, continued to mean so much to her despite most of the people she had known having left it behind long ago, just as she had.  But I suppose the ghosts, the memories, had remained behind.

Now, at nearly 26-years-old, I’ve lived in several places, all of which I carry a certain affection for after my time spent in each, whether it was the four months in England, the four years in Indiana, or the three years in San Jose, I will never be able to return to any of these places and feel nothing for them.  To me, memory is the great catalyst for emotion, especially as even love tends to spawn from a shared history of affirmation, though I realize nothing is quite that simple.  We’ve all heard many times the old saying, “home is where the heart is,” but it’s not as simple a subject as it seems.  I think most of us leave pieces of our hearts in many different places, with many different people.  It’s true, I have my family in St. Louis and wonderful friends as well.  But I have people I love in San Jose too, and Indiana, and many other corners of the world as those I meet with their feet less planted in the ground move on.  The strange thing about spreading the pieces of your heart among such a variety of people is that when they move away, they’ll take that part of you with them, so that before long we look at the country and maybe even the world and start to feel as though we’ve already been cremated, our ashes scattered in the wind.

I'm fairly certain that I have cried every time I have left St. Louis.  A piece of me knows this is in no small part due to the people I leave behind each time I go—it has never been easy for me.  But the other piece thinks every city, every town, every landscape has its own music that begins to play in your blood when you make a life there.  The longer you stay, the more the music weaves its way into you so that it eventually becomes harder and harder to leave.  This method may be a little on the manipulative side, like a lover who manages to seduce you again just when you were about to move on, just when you thought you didn’t need him anymore, but I have to believe the intentions are worthy.  After all, every city has a population to maintain.  As for me, I know that St. Louis holds the music I need to hear at this point in my life.  When I see the arch, something in my chest swells with longing.   Who knows how long it will be before I feel the need to escape to another unfamiliar land, but there’s no denying the power my hometown has to pull me back in again and again.

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