Two weeks ago, my grandmother died. She was almost 94. Her death was not a tragedy, not unexpected, but as with all deaths, it was a painful loss, so although it was the second-to-last week of school, I flew to the Midwest to attend services.
When I go to Chicago, I usually say, “I’m going home.” However, I’ve spent the last five years in the Southwest and have come to question whether the Midwest is still home.
The question of home is one that dominates my world literature course, where students read The Odyssey and Red Azalea in which notions of home shift: home is lost, home is altered, home is abandoned, home is missed. Sometimes, as in the case of The Odyssey, home is regained and remade, but sometimes, as in the case of Persepolis, home is changed and lost forever.
While I haven’t such a dramatic relationship with home as the ancient Greek heroes or Anchee Min, if the Midwest is indeed home, I am now a guest, a visitor.
Two weeks after my grandmother’s funeral, I return again for my planned, annual summer trip to visit friends and family.
On the train to the city from my parents’ house in the suburbs, the sight of downtown Chicago thrills me, and I photograph it like a tourist.
In the city, I eat gyros and drink wine al fresco in Greektown with Megan who observes that a woman is “dressed like a dustbowl archaeologist” and makes me laugh hard because I’ve known her long enough to decode such absurd statements. I drink French press coffee with my sister, and ride the bus to my cousin Hope’s condo in Lincoln Park, where we eat bulgogi on her balcony that overlooks the zoo and a soupçon of Lake Michigan. This particular balcony is one of my favorite places on earth. At Kristine’s, we go to her living room, which she jokingly calls “the parlor,” and play Memory with her husband and 8-year-old daughter.
Kristine found a vintage version of Memory online, a deck from the early ‘80s, and the feel of and images on the cards—the bumblebee, the cherries, the rose—trigger quick memories from childhood I didn’t even know I had: the feel of an area rug in a relative’s home, the smell of an aunt’s cologne, a neighborhood kid whose freckles I remember, but not his name.
In Chicago, I won’t attend a museum or a theater performance or a reading. Though I often pine for such cultural offerings, they are but a backdrop to what I’m really after.
My wife told me she read somewhere that marriage is, in part, about having someone who bears witness to your life. Other relationships provide this, too, of course, but they become scarce as we get older. People grow apart, people move, people die.
My sister and cousin were born when I was 7 and 8, respectively. Kristine and Megan I’ve known since I was a teenager. There is never any backstory required. I don’t have to explain that what I want to do is eat kimchi fries on balconies, drink French press coffee, have wine and listen to Megan make her uniquely absurd observations, marvel at Kristine’s wit, feel the contagion of my sister’s laughter, swap classroom tales with my cousin who is also a teacher. I want to laugh until I cry. I want to hear stories. I want to tell stories.
Recently I learned that my high school students really like John Denver’s “Country Roads.” I was baffled when they belted out the first verse, “Almost heaven/ West Virginia!” They tell me “Country Roads” is a meme, and while I know what memes are, I am still unclear how a song can be a meme. In any case, their affinity for the song stuck in my head as I packed for my trip.
On the shuttle to Sky Harbor I listened to John Denver. (Sometimes the only cure for an earworm is the earworm itself.) One needn’t have a connection to West Virginia to grasp the sentiment of the song. Chicago makes me feel this way, Iowa, too, and in a few days I will make the four-hour drive from my parents’ to a small town in Iowa where my father’s side of the family lives. In recent years, this drive was largely made with my grandmother in mind. Every trip was likely the “last time” with her though I’d never say, “Goodbye,” preferring instead the more hopeful, “See you later.”
There was always coffee in Grandma Jean’s kitchen. Sometimes there was potato salad, sometimes ice cream or lunch meat, but always, always coffee. We’d warm our hands around our cups and she’d tell me about relatives I never met or stories about my dad, like the one when he and my uncle buried the neighbor boy up to his neck, put a bucket over his head and told my grandmother they’d “accidentally chopped his head off.” She’d tell me about growing up poor, but seemingly happy, in Iowa.
She’d ask me about my work, about the weather wherever I happened to be living—Chicago, Milwaukee, Flagstaff. We’d make each other laugh. Eventually she’d take me out to her tomato plants, in her later years grown in buckets rather than in a garden. She’d bring me into her sewing room, show me what she was working on—quilts, bunnies and bears for the little kids—then usually load my arms with handmade coasters, oven mitts, potholders.
Every morning in Flagstaff, my coffee cup rests on a coaster she sewed.
In “Country Roads,” Denver isn’t really singing about being in a place, so much as he is expressing the feeling of a place, or a longing to be returned to the feeling itself. And in this way, the song (much to my surprise) resonates —when I go to Chicago, when I go to Iowa, I’m not necessarily seeking the place itself, but a return to certain feelings that I might inhabit, at least approximately, for a week or two. I’m not sure if, as Denver says of West Virginia, the Midwest is “the place I belong,” but it’s definitely comfortable.
This summer’s visit to Iowa will be for the feeling of being with my Aunt Joanne, of picking radishes and peas and berries in her vegetable garden, of strong coffee in the morning and late night chats around the kitchen table and possibly, if I’m lucky, the feeling I get from big thunderstorms and ground cherry pie.
On the drive to Iowa, I will marvel at how green it all is, something I never fully appreciated until I moved west. I will drive over the Mississippi River on a bridge that used to frighten me as a child. I will notice the sprawl of corn fields and soybean fields, wonder about the history and demise of the dilapidated farmhouses that blink by along the highway. I will think of my grandmother. And yes, I will probably listen to John Denver.
