As a teenager in rural Henry County, Ohio, I couldn’t wait to go to college and get the hell out of that stinkin’ place.
I even became an exchange student my junior year of high school and spent one amazing year in Denmark. I returned to my hillbilly town a raging socialist. Yeah. That went over well. Senioritis and reverse culture shock made my last year of high school excruciating.
Needless to say, after graduation I left for college and never looked back.
I moved around a little spending some time in the Cleveland area and then Los Angeles, but an undiagnosed mental illness brought my life crashing down. I needed treatment and my family’s help, so I moved back to the area. That was twenty years ago.
Today, I live near where I grew up, but in Toledo. I have grown accustomed to all the conveniences of city life, and I love raising my daughter where there’s plenty of diversity and opportunity.
The strange thing is, I have become more fond of where I grew up as I’ve gotten older. Sure, I wanted to leave, but I can look back at a lot of good memories. Being a country kid was a lot of fun. Fireworks and bonfires. Swimming in the river. Spending hours playing in the woods. Seeing a million stars in the night sky.
My daughter is such a city girl. She will never know what it’s like to live without pizza delivery or not having restaurants and stores within walking distance. Hell, there are four Target stores within twenty minutes of our house. She doesn’t know what it’s like to live somewhere where everyone looks like you.
But then again, my daughter has never seen thousands of lightning bugs blinking and hovering over the alfalfa field behind my childhood home.
I wouldn’t want to move back to where I grew up, and I certainly wouldn’t want to raise my daughter there, but I’m at a point now where I can look back and say it wasn’t all bad.
Can you relate? What was it like where you grew up compared to where you live now? Maybe you stayed in the same place or maybe you made some changes like me. Do you look back at your hometown with fond memories…or at least realize that it wasn’t as backward as you thought it was?
“Do you grow more fond of where you grew up as you get older?”
ohfuckno
Where I grew up is ok to visit, but only to see my parents. Otherwise what chigau says.
Funny thing, I had mostly okay memories of where I grew up, and very few bullies or other nasty people to get the hell away from; but I don’t have nearly as much nostalgia or fondness for that area as you seem to have for your old hometown (not yet anyway). Part of that may be because it was a relatively generic suburb, not a rural area with as much natural wonders as you grew up with. Also, all the growth, urbanization, gentrification, whatever you want to call it, that happened there since I moved out on my own has been a huge improvement, not something that swept away anything I cherished and would now miss. The sleepy-small-town storefronts, big old Hecht’s building and Putt-Putt Mini-Golf weren’t much to write about; and I sure as hell don’t miss those big swastika flags that flanked the front door of the American Nazi Party’s HQ…
I think it’s natural to look back with nostalgia…but the truth is, the rural area you grew up in 30 years ago is not the same for kids growing up there now. Rivers are polluted with pesticide and animal waste, fireflies are dying out, ticks carrying Lyme disease and meat allergies are endemic, mosquitoes routinely carry West Nile and dengue fever and other diseases, and rural kids are often tearing up the environment on ATVs or else face-deep in their phones bullying each other and following “influencers” who are convincing them to change their eye-color (real thing I just learned) and to hate themselves.
Sadly, the intolerance and prejudice you encountered growing up probably hasn’t changed.
I grew up in a town (population on the order of 10,000 to 15,000 or so) in southeastern Ohio. I was mostly apathetic towards the place when I was a kid. I despise it now.
At the moment, I still live in the general area (about 80 km away), but my current job ends after the 2024–’25 academic year, and I’ll be looking to get out of this place, hopefully for good.
@RagingBee; are you referring to Hecht’s Department Store? I was once stationed in a place where there was a Hecht’s. It was a good, all-around department store–like a higher-class Sears, maybe a bit nicer than JC Penney. IIRC, I bought a lot of housewares and kids’ clothes there, and the watch I’m wearing right now. Was there ever a free-standing Hecht’s? I remember them as anchor stores in nearby malls.
As a military brat, I never had a hometown, per se. I enjoyed most of the places I’ve lived and would go back to visit if I had a reason to, but I don’t feel especially nostalgic about them.
“The past is a foreign contry”** as the quote from Star Trek -The Undiscovered Country goes.*
Not sure I have grown up and still growing here I think / hope despite now being old -depending on what is meant by growing up.
In some ways, maybe but I still live inthe place I’ve spent most of my life and the only other city I remember living in, Melbourne Victoria , Oz, I’m not a big fan of partly because its so much bigger than Adelaide, South Oz where I’m very lucky to live. Also quite a lot of bad memories of melbourne from when i was an odd kid who was being bullied and suffering there inthe earliest ten years or so of my schooling.
.* Plus a South Korean film apparently : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Past_is_a_Foreign_Country
.** Time machine required for visiting. may have drawbacks..
I was an Air Force brat in my early childhood. Urban, rural, small town, US, Germany, five elementary schools in six years. I knew a lot of the joys of rural life, but as disparate moments spread over two continents. My later childhood was in Puget Sound, in the vestiges of the forest and its doomed creatures, rapidly being bull-dozed away and replaced with suburbs. So I have no ties to a particular location from my early life, and I have a great appreciation for the wild world – why I am an inveterate camper.
Not really. The town I grew up in seemed to me a great place while I was growing up in it. It was only when I left I realised how deprived parts of it, and many of the people in it, were. I can only be grateful to my mother and grandmother, my teachers and the other adults around me for making the very, very best of what was available and giving me a childhood I feel lucky to have had. I wouldn’t really want to live there now, mainly because in today’s Britain I know my kids wouldn’t have the chances I did (e.g. free, grant-aided university education, just for one thing), so I need to stay where I am, in range of better schools and opportunities. Something of a shame… but it’s not the place I remember, and perhaps never really was.
@Katydid: the Hecht’s in my county was, IIRC, a free-standing building, long before shopping malls like Tysons became much of a thing. There was a McCrory’s right nearby (where I got most of my Batman-related toys when I was into Batman); but I don’t remember whether that building, or any other nearby store, was actually attached to Hecht’s.
In front of Hecht’s was a huge one-level car-park, and the building had ‘PARKINGTON” in huge letters on its front — which I always thought was a really stoopid name, like you’re naming your neighborhood after a parking-lot? (Much older maps had the name Balls Crossing.) Later Hecht’s was torn down and a huge posh mall was built up there called Ballston Common, after the tube-station it grew up around. Not sure when Hecht’s merged with Macy’s, or whether either store was originally in that mall. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve been there. I’m not nostalgic about it, but I was impressed when I flew over it once and saw how nicely built-up the “Orange Line Corridor” had become. The sprawling steel and concrete had made a city of my town, as the song goes; and I felt fine about it.
My memories start when I was about five years old and we moved to Delray Beach, Florida. That was still the Deep South back then, and they still had de jure racial segregation which, even as a kid, I recognized as, let’s say, “asymmetric” (although I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my feelings then). I had occasion to drive through the town two or three years ago and didn’t recognize anything at all.
After my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved back to St. Louis where she grew up, I went to two different primary schools in the fourth grade neither which I liked at all, and I didn’t have any friends.
My memories start getting better in the fifth grade when my mom bought a small house in a really good school district. That was after Brown v. Board but before Loving v. Virginia, so there was still plenty of de facto segregation and the races didn’t mingle.
<aside>Make America Great Again? This boomer remembers the middle of the last century as being pretty good—for cis het while males at least. It was a time of high marginal tax rates and strong unions which resulted in a rising middle class. Magazines like Motor Trend and Popular Mechanics ran articles with titles like “Car of the Future” and “Home of the Future”, and I read them all as a kid. Parents had the reasonable expectation that their children would have it better than they did.
If we could go back to that, but without all the racism, misogyny, etc., I’d be all for it. For the MAGAts though, it seems like it was precisely the hatefullness, self-importance and self-satisfaction that were “great”.
</aside>I have no desire to return to any of that.
@RagingBee; I’ve been to the DC metro area for work, and took the Metro to get around. I remember hearing “Ballston” as “Boston” and being amused–just how far did the orange line go?!?
Dunno about the Orange Line, but I sometimes heard it said that the “Northwest” quadrant of DC extended from the Capitol to Boston.
Howdy Ashes,
I’m living next door to the house I grew up in. My parents are still there, and the house I’m in was once my grandfathers. But while it’s rural, it’s got the best of many worlds. It is ten minutes from the smallish town I spent much of my youth in, Plymouth. Plymouth has grown tremendously from when I was frequenting the place, and we almost never go there any more. Instead, when we do go out we tend to go into Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti.
I admit that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in my life, being raised non-secular in an area where no one asked, or cared which church I went to. Being close to Ann Arbor, where during my teenage years we would see foreign films at the Modern Language Building, or visit the Natural History Museum (now moved and greatly changed). Later in my life I spent a lot of time in the bars and used-book stores. While in Plymouth at the Pen Theater we could see second-run movies cheaply, or go to mall theaters in Livonia to see first-run movies.
So I am fond of the place I grew up, and I returned here after 35 years living in other places (usually within 50 miles).
On a tangentially related topic, this may also be a time to make you and your family an offer which I’ve been thinking about for a bit more than a year. Since you are in Toledo, and I have no idea where in Toledo you are, you are only about an hours drive south of us. We are members of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and we have a family pass which allows us to bring in additional people for free. If you and your family are interested, my wife and I would be happy extend an invitation for you to accompany us on a trip to Greenfield Village and/or the Henry Ford Museum. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve invited comparative strangers to join us there and used our membership to allow them free entry, so I promise that I’m not thinking that I know you well enough from your blogging to consider you or your family as friends. I’m only suggesting this because you are relatively close, geographically, and you or your family might be interested.
There is no time limit on the invitation. I know you will want to let your knee fully heal because there will be a lot of walking. If you are interested details can be worked out later, I assume you can find my direct e-mail address. I made no effort to find yours. I will take no offense if you ignore this offer, or turn it down. It can be scary meeting new people, and people whom you’ve only interacted with over the internet can be difficult to meet in person. That’s part of the reason I’ve been hemming and hawing about this for the last year. I’m certain your family is nice, but you have no idea about us. But if you take us up on the offer, and after meeting us decide that you don’t want to hang around with a taciturn old man (when I write I’m prolix, but in person I’d rather listen) and his beautiful, if garrulous, wife, you will still have free entry into the museum. Cheers!
Thank you so much for the invitation! Yes, I definitely will need to let my knee heal first, but I will think about it.
BTW, I LOVE Ann Arbor! It’s a nice escape for progressives from Toledo! I just wish it wasn’t so hot when they have the big summer art show!
Let us know when you are ready, and we can work out timing/dates. No rush, no pressure. It doesn’t have to be this year. Just drop me a line when you are ready.
For what it’s worth we generally, like a lot of other townies, avoid Ann Arbor during the Art Fair. It’s a great event, but between the heat, and the one rainstorm which always shows up, we generally give it a miss. I’ve never been to the Hash Bash either. Not really my bag, man.