My people, My place

I am currently in Dekalb, Illinois, my hometown.  The place where I grew up or, better yet, the place that grew me up. 

It's a place where my family is and where all the things that I love and hate about myself exist. But, the fact that this place (figuratively and literally) exists for me at all, and still, humbles me. It is a place where people drive me crazy.  Where family has expectations of me and I constantly try to free myself of them.  That urge has softened in me a bit in the last year and though I have little tolerance at times for the ways of my family, I cannot deny the purity and simplicity of their love for me.  I drive them crazy too, after all. 

My grandmother, Alice, grew me up quite literally.  We lived with her much of the time growing up.  She is a quiet woman who resists and resents direction from most anyone, but mostly from men.  Her mother died tragically when she was  5 or 6 and then she lived a while in an orphanage until extended family took her in.  I cannot imagine what her life has been like. She is 84 now and reminds me everytime I see her, "I'm really old now, Peanut. I forget things all the time" to which I always respond "That is a lot of years to remember things, who wouldn't forget things at 84"?  and then she laughs.  

My grandmother often wishes that I would move back so that I would live in the same town with her.  She never understands people leaving, but she will counter it by telling me she knows I have a good job and that is really important. She tells me that if she wins the lottery she wants us to open up a little corner grocery store with me because we're both so good with people. She has always had this dream of owning her own little grocery with me. 

Driving here in the summer is so freeing for me.  I can only liken it to being somewhere it is natural for you to be, even if it isn't the place you fit in most naturally.  The back country roads I drive to get here are flat and uneventful for most, but to me they are a connection with the land; the people. The fields, the waves of tall grasses in between cornfields responding to the wind, the sweet stench of cow shit.  The dilapitated farmhouses or barns with beat-up cars, hoods popped, in the front yards.  Grubby looking men wiping their hands on their pants. 

And although Dekalb is changing drastically and generally isn't at all like what I've been describing, parts of it are still like this.  My family is still like this. 

We all have things to learn from each other, and they will be hard, I promise.  But, I have to remember to take a deep breath, look out at those fields and remember what it is in me that is natural.