Ode to Home
By Faith Geiger
Photo courtesy of the author
On one of my first weekends in New York, I told a drunk man on the subway platform that I grew up across a cornfield.
It was Halloween weekend. We were all in costume and waiting to take the L train back into Brooklyn — a place that was now, for all intents and purposes, my home. But something about that word didn’t quite fit New York yet. Home — real home — was Indiana.
“I can see that,” the man replied, in a way I knew was meant to be an insult.
At some point in my life, perhaps in high school, I would have wrinkled my nose or scoffed, or both, if someone had told me they could tell I was from the Midwest. I would have rattled off all the things I hated about the region and scrambled to defend myself. I would have insisted that I was different from all of that. I hated country music; there was never anything to do; the people lacked culture; my time was spent fantasizing about the day I would live somewhere far, far away from it all.
But by now I had gained such an appreciation for my roots that the comment struck me as sweet rather than cruel. I know there is a Midwestern quality to my demeanor. I can’t pinpoint what it is exactly — perhaps a certain Midwestern kindness, an openness to trust that sometimes translates to naivety or foolishness on my face and in my voice. It could, of course, simply come down to the way I dress or wear my hair. But whatever it is, I never want to lose that part of me. I hope every time I tell someone I grew up first in Illinois and then in Indiana, they say something like, “That makes sense.” That response is how I’ll know I’m still carrying home with me, no matter how long I’m away or how far I go.
“What do you do there?”
People love to ask when you tell them you grew up in the Midwest. It’s a good question. The answer is not much, which can sometimes feel like everything.
We sip sodas outside of convenience stores. We take field trips to farms and see the live births of cows. We consume obscene amounts of fried food and cheese and sometimes fried cheese at the county fair. We play bags, or cornhole, depending on who you ask. We smile at strangers. We take two hours to say goodbye. We “squeeze right past ya,” and apologize for it. We eat puppy chow and corn on the cob, and pigs in a blanket. We go to the beach, which I was never much of a fan of, until my friends from college took me to the Indiana Dunes — a hometown staple for them.
Many people are surprised to hear about the quality of the beaches in Indiana. My friends and I have even found ourselves in heated arguments with East- and West-Coasters who doubt the validity of such beaches. But no matter who will try to argue against it, they are there: we have beautiful, real beaches, with sand and water, and people drinking Miller Lites and playing pop-country music from their speakers, and getting sunburnt and going home and grilling corn and hot dogs for dinner, and falling asleep happy. So, yes. We go to the beach.
When we need to think or talk, or listen to a particular song, we drive out to the middle of nowhere — all the way to the blinking windmills that look like giants. We lie down on the wide country roads so we can look at the endless stars. We dream. There is something about the Midwest that is so perfect for dreaming; there is so much room for it.
I think this is part of the reason the region is such a common setting for coming of age stories: The Fault in Our Stars. All the Bright Places. John Hughes films. Columbus. Stranger Things. Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast even named an entire song about teenage yearning after a town in Indiana.
“I’ll wait, passing time just popping wheelies / And kicking round this flyover state,” Zauner sings in “Kokomo, IN.” The song even features a tender nod to those underappreciated Indiana beaches: “God I felt so much back then,” the lyrics lament. “I was soft as a dune.”
Zauner says she wrote the song from the perspective of a boy whose girlfriend has left for a foreign exchange program. “If ever you come back,” the chorus echoes. “ … Just know that I’ll be here longing.”
What better backdrop for those feelings than a small Indiana town? There is a perpetual sense of adolescent longing that, to me, is inseparable from the Midwest — but maybe that’s just because I was a teenager there. I imagine most people feel the same about the places in which they grew up.
It seems many of us spend so much of our young lives dreaming of what lies outside the bounds of home, fantasizing about all the ways we can someday escape its grip. But once we finally get the chance, we spend the rest of our lives on the lookout for small ways to return. What once felt restricting becomes comforting; the streets of our hometowns are at once familiar and brand new, because we can see them with fresh eyes.
Someone I spoke to once about Indiana referred to this feeling as the “Lady Bird effect.” Although the titular character of Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film grew up nowhere near the Midwest (rather in Sacramento, California), she does echo a similar sentiment throughout her coming of age journey. Lady Bird’s slow-surfacing love for Sacramento is especially evident in a voicemail she leaves her mother once she’s made it to her dream university in New York City. She has plunged headfirst into the life she always hoped she would live, and it is as terrifying as it is wonderful.
As Lady Bird records the voicemail, her face is smudged with makeup from the long, drunken night before. She’s standing in front of a Catholic church; she has just attended mass in an attempt to latch on to a semblance of the home she has only just realized she loves.
“Hey, Mom. Did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento?” Lady Bird asks. “I did, and I wanted to tell you, but we weren't really talking when it happened. All those bends I've known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing. But I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you. I’m … Thank you.”
I, too, find myself missing home the most when I am hungover or sick or tired or lost. In all of its excitement, the city has a way of stretching me out and shaking me around until all I want to do is take a long car ride down a desolate highway, past fields of soybean and corn, and cows.
I want to have an hour-long conversation in a car parked in the Kroger parking lot. I want to spend a few hours in the basement of the used bookstore in which a boy kissed me, badly, for the first time. I want to run laps on the high school track–something I avoided doing as much as possible when it was a requirement for P.E. class.
I want to enter the sliding glass door of the house I grew up in and walk up the staircase I posed at before school dances. I want to take a nap in my childhood bedroom, where I will never consider throwing out even a single one of the trinkets that clutter its surfaces. I want to stare at the blindingly bright green walls I thought were a good idea in 6th grade, which were once covered floor-to-ceiling in One Direction posters.
I want to wake up and know immediately that I am home, where downstairs, my mother is cooking something fragrant for dinner. Where I know exactly where the floorboards creak. Where the nights are still, and the stars are bright, and the mornings are quiet and pink.
This is not all to say I will ever return for good, but rather that I will never have to, because part of me will always remain at home; part of home will always remain in me.
I love New York, and I don’t see myself leaving any time soon. The skyline is tremendous and breathtaking and everything I’ve ever dreamed of seeing on a routine walk to the grocery store. I am glad to have made it here.
But in so many ways, nothing will ever compare to the view of a lightning-cracked sky spread out over a cornfield, wide-open and sublime. My memories of sitting in my mother’s lap, watching it all from the porch as the rain pounded above us, are a reminder that I was once so small and yet so safe — a reminder that I still am, and that I always will be, as long as home is waiting for me. ♦