Home Again

Milford, Michigan

Once or twice a year, I head back to Michigan.  Holidays with family, weddings of friends, there's never a shortage of reasons.  I often joke that "you can never go home again."  Things are different now. There are new buildings, different stores, fewer friends around--it's changed.  It's a different place than what you used to call home, and so you can't "go home" any more than you can go back in time.

But I've been spending a lot of time in Michigan in the last year.  More than in the last several years combined.  Sometimes in familiar places, sometimes in new places.  But it's all, on some level, familiar.  There's a unique atmosphere to it, a type of people, an aesthetic to the landscape, that is unmistakably...home?  Not my current home.  But absolutely where I come from.

I grew up in a town called Milford.  There's a Milford in almost every state, and with a few exceptions, they're all variations on the same theme.  About an hour or so from some large city, there's a little town on a river.  The town itself holds a few to several thousand people, but the outlying farms and nearby even smaller towns contribute to the feel of the population as well.  There's one major industry in or near the town.  The "downtown" area on Main Street consists of a couple blocks, and includes a bakery, the local paper, a jeweler, a toy store, and the rest of the collection of restaurants and small shops not yet put out of business by the brand new WalMart two towns over.  The folks who live there pride themselves on their town's obscure--but interesting--history, and on knowing that they live in a great place to raise kids.  They all not-so-secretly believe they are the real town Garrison Keillor talks about every week, "where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average."

My Milford was my childhood Mayberry.  I rode my bike with a friend down to the bridge over the river where we'd spend the afternoon with half-hearted fishing lines in the water talking comic books.  We built tree forts in the woods and held our breath walking past the cemetery.  I walked down the street to neighbors near and far saying hello.  My high school's football field on Friday night was the place to be--even if the team hardly ever won.

My Milford has changed a lot in the intervening years.  The population has boomed as the outskirts of Detroit have grown into suburbs of their own, and suburbs of suburbs now reach all the way out to my little town.  The cute little stores are now high-end boutiques.  They even repealed an age-old law against buildings more than two stories tall and have built a few that are (gasp!) three and four stories tall.  Friends and family have moved away.  What once was the kind of place you looked for to live the small-town life is now a trendy spot to go out for dinner.

And yet there is a pull.  Those little familiarities, that remind you why, though you'd never admit it, you did look back over your shoulder as you left.  The way you know where you're going even though it's been ages since you've gone there.  The bend in the road you anticipate out of habit.  The surprising recollection of some neighborhood landmark that was of no significance twenty years ago when you passed it every day, yet you now start at the tiniest thrill of recognition.

It pulls at you gently, almost imperceptibly.  You effortlessly slip into a routine that you didn't realize you still remembered.  The place lulls you in, reminds you of its beauty, discretely hides its faults. Tugs at the nostalgia-laden heartstrings like a conversation with an old friend.  Let's catch up.  How've you been?  You've really changed.  You're exactly the same.

Just when you think that maybe you can go home again, you begin to realize that this place has grown up, too.  Where you once rode your bike to the Dime & Cent store for comic books and plastic swords. you now drive over to shop for locally-made home furnishings.  The ice cream parlor with the high counter and arcade video games has become a restaurant to meet old friends and reminisce.  Other friends prefer the popular new restaurant down the street, though you can't help but see it as the old pizza joint where you worked your first job at sixteen.

Nostalgia and the realization of change are, by definition, at odds.  Nowhere does that seem more true than when looking at your own home--not where you live now, but where you come from.  I can't go home again, not really, but I can visit it in stories, photo albums, and all those happy childhood memories.