The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, September 6th. It is the eighth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Philando Castile, the Milwaukee Bucks, and Comfort Zones
It’s Labor Day Weekend, which means fall could be coming any day now, at least back north. I never thought much about this when I lived back north. The seasons came and went, the weather and the calendar one and the same in my head. Down here, in Texas, I’m still figuring out the seasons. Sometimes, the calendar surprises me.
I became aware of this early last year, but it struck home most pointedly sometime around Labor Day. It wasn’t yet cold in the Midwest, or even necessarily cool, but summer had let up enough that sweatshirts and blankets were out on pontoon boats even in the afternoons, and I—watching through the window of Instagram—was reminded I was a long way from home.
The Midwest, I’d venture, is a bigger part of how I think of myself than it is for most Midwesterners. Perhaps it’s because I no longer live in the Midwest, or because I went to a rather national school for college, or because of the generations of Iowans, Illinoisans, and Hoosiers who comprise my ancestry. Perhaps it’s just because I think about myself more than most people do. Perhaps it’s because the Midwest has accumulated, culturally, a set of qualities rather easy for me to bend into some aspirational identity—durable, reliable, sensible, humble—in the hopes it might serve as a thread from the farms and factories populated by my forefathers.
The Midwest, like any region, contains regionality within itself. There’s the sooty stomping of the Rust Belt. There’s the quiet contemplation of the lakes and trees, nestled amidst the grandeur of the Great Lakes. There’s the simple earnestness of the Corn Belt and the broad ambition of the Plains. There are cities: some once mighty, a few still so. There are towns: often husks of themselves, bearing an image of days gone by; but occasionally vibrant and thriving, and not in a produced way. There’s the guarded suspicion of Missouri. There’s the bumbling boisterousness of Wisconsin. There’s the Western liberty of the Dakotas. There’s the Eastern commerce of Ohio. The Midwest holds no claim to superiority over any other American region. But it’s where I’m from. It’s where I fit. Especially in towns like Crystal Lake and South Bend, where corn and soybeans dance with industry with one hand and trees and lakes with the other.
I used to think I’d end up back in the Midwest. I still hope for it from time to time. But I doubt it’s to be, and I remind myself that even if I am to return, it’ll be a different Midwest from what it was to me as a child and adolescent. I’m marrying a Southerner…kind of. Born in Atlanta, raised around Atlanta, somewhere between the East Coast and the South in culture and tastes and heritage. We met in South Bend. She’s lived in the Midwest. She doesn’t fit there. And while it’s tolerable for some and a joy for others to not fit, there’s a lot of comfort to be had in fitting.
It’s different for me with her home than it is for her to mine. The draw to hers is as simple as proximity to family and a familial softness for the places of her memories, whereas the draw to mine is more of a soul thing—a contrast that reflects her emotional practicality and my soaring sentimentality perhaps more than it reflects our homes themselves. I suspect we’ll eventually land somewhere between New Jersey and Charlotte—or maybe further west, in Tennessee—but that’s all a tentative bet, with plenty of life to be lived before our children’s hometown is chosen (and a grudge still burning against Virginia for its Reckless Driving law). Wherever it is, it’s likely it won’t be the Midwest, which means it’s likely our kids will not be Midwesterners.
And so the question nags of where we will be, and what our kids will be, and what their kids will be, and what we will be. Will I be a Midwesterner? Will some of that Midwestern-ness carry on to my offspring? Will one of them, or more, someday return, in a more permanent sense? Will they know the warm wind that blows over brown earth in March or April, drying the muddy ground as it drinks in the ice and the snow and the slush? Will they know the crackle of fall, the real crackle of fall, the crackle of my fall and not some warmer, authentic-to-someone-else-but-not-me version? Will they know how high corn’s supposed to be by Independence Day? Or will they become Marylanders, or East Coasters, or Carolinians the same way my great-grandparents became Americans rather than Germans and Irish and Swedes?
On my last visit home, for Christmas, before the pandemic, the Midwest felt somewhat foreign. It may have been the unseasonable warmth, or the scattered sprawl of my growing family, or the fatigue that accompanied the end of a beautiful, difficult, draining year. But it felt foreign, more foreign than it had even felt in October when we visited on a perfect fall weekend, blue at times and gray at times and, true to form, crisp—crewneck sweatshirt weather. There was still the relief of that stretch of I-90 between Randall Road and O’Hare, with its familiar office towers and forest preserves. There was still the cold thrill of looking out on the lake’s choppy-but-not-whitecapped waters on a clear blue morning. There was still the idyllic placidity of South Shore Drive. But it felt foreign. That, or I felt foreign. The warmth meant the question wasn’t answered of whether I’d want a thicker coat than I used to, but that question lurks, waiting for what could one day be a discouraging revelation.
It could well be that this fear—this fear that I’ll need a thicker coat on visits to Chicago—is a bigger one than the fear that my children will not be Midwestern. It could be that I’m not so much scared of not fitting in where I live as I am of not fitting in where I lived. I don’t know, to be honest. It’s likely a mixture of both.
But as the weather prepares to change up north, and waits longer to change down here, there’s more than just a sense of being left behind. There’s more than even just homesickness. There’s nostalgia. Nostalgia for some self-envisioned Eden that in exact detail never was. But nostalgia nonetheless.
It’s Labor Day Weekend, and I miss my home. It’s Labor Day Weekend, and I miss what that home means.
Next week’s essay: On September 11th, and the Generation It Didn’t Change
