Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”
There are three cities that I could call home, if I wanted to.
Starkville, a city in Mississippi, was the site where I learned to pedal a pink-and-purple bike, complete with a plastic flower-power basket, down a cul-de-sac full of neighbors I knew by name, where I kicked increasingly bigger soccer balls into increasingly bigger nets, where I attended church and Sunday school and in a warehouse-transformed-into-sanctuary, where I had the aisles of the public library memorized, where I finally learned to drive a real car through real avenues.
The county seat of Oktibbeha County, Starkville was saved by the presence of a Division I University, bringing thousands and thousands of young people to a place which would have only counted as a well-populated town, for Mississippi, if not for that added boost. My father was a professor, and my mom a lecturer at Mississippi State University, which, at just below twenty thousand undergraduate students, felt like a city of its own, and I belonged to it. By middle-school, I could navigate the roads of the university as easily as my cul-de-sac neighborhood—by foot or by plastic flower-power bike.
Elk Rapids was my next stop, a small village in Michigan that doesn’t quite count as a city, unless you say you’re from “near Traverse City,” which is fifteen minutes away from Elk Rapids and is hardly a city in its own right, with about fifteen thousand people. Elk Rapids has about fifteen thousand people—minus fourteen thousand.
The village was the backdrop to my last two years in high school, and some of the best years of my life. It’s a gem of a harbortown, ten miles north of Traverse City and zero miles from Lake Michigan. Here, my friends and I gathered in vine-ridden backyards, hiked on nature trails, dived into Elk Lake and Torch Lake and any other lake we could find. We drove our cars just a little too fast down curvy country roads. We sat on cold, metal bleachers for Friday night football games, hang out in the parking lot of the high school late at night, and jogged a two-mile loop to the nearby bay, coming back smelling like sweat and Lake Michigan. Whenever I go back to Elk Rapids, I always meet someone who knows me by name—whether it’s my soccer teammate’s mother, my former math teacher, or the little sibling of someone in my graduating class. There’s always someone to wave to.
Now, Grand Rapids is the city where I have a mailbox and a full-time job. It’s where I went to college—which are supposed to be the golden years of your life, but were just okay for me—and it’s where I learned to be an adult. I have a favorite coffee shop—Squibb on Wealthy Street—and daily running route—down Madison Street towards the Meyer May House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a loop around Union Avenue, where President Ford’s childhood home sits. I’ve spent nearly five years in Grand Rapids, but it still doesn’t feel quite like home, like I thought it would.
I’ve been told, many times, “home is people.” And it’s partly true. Starkville was my childhood home because it’s where my family raised me. Elk Rapids is home because of my friends, with whom I still keep in contact. And in Grand Rapids, I have coworkers and old college pals and church connections.
But I miss my Starkville neighborhood and the campus of Mississippi State. I miss the harbors of Elk Rapids,
I’ve come to believe that you can’t entirely divorce geography from the concept of home.
Home is not just people. Places matter, even though places might change or transform or be replaced, but the fact remains that home is the plane on which our lives unfold. As much as we belong to the city-dwellers and village residents with whom we share our pieces of earth, we also belong to our cities.
Home, I believe, is also a place.
Hannah Riffell has landed in Lansing, Michigan twenty-three years after she was born there, nineteen years after she moved to Mississippi, seven years after she moved to Northern Michigan, and two years after she graduated from a university in Grand Rapids. You probably can’t find her because she’s either exploring the state, wandering around her city, or just lost in her own head.
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I can see the soft shapes of these cities in only a few words–the ordinary place described in a way I’d never thought of before. It rains in these places, but the sun comes out too, and its a delight to explore home with you here!
Thanks Gabbie! Always a delight with you 🙂
“I’ve come to believe that you can’t entirely divorce geography from the concept of home.”
Hmm, I resonate with this.
You and I have had opposite geographical experiences. I was raised in GR, and ended up moving to Mississippi post-Calvin. Even after four years, my body and mind ache for GR and Michigan in ways I can’t explain to the people here who have never experienced it.
Hi Naomi- thanks for your thoughtful comment. That’s so funny that we switched states! I hope you’re enjoying your time in Mississippi, but I know once you leave “home” it’s hard to just make anywhere feel like home.