Sense of Place, Sense of Home

I never told anyone I was from Texas until I moved to New York City. During the seventeen years I lived in Texas, I told everyone I was from Maryland, which is where I was born, and lived for the first two years of my life. I was astounded at how quickly I returned to my Southern “roots” when I finally moved away from my small East Texas town of Commerce. Somehow, all those years of wishing I was living somewhere else vanished in the first few days of living here. One would think that this fast return to allegiance for my childhood home might teach me something about being more grateful and loyal to the place where I grew up. But it didn’t. When I go back to Texas now, I always make a point to tell people I live in New York.

In many ways, the study of sense of place fascinates me because of this very paradox. I was raised in the most conservative, religious stretch of East Texas by northeastern natives who often vote for Ralph Nader (because voting for the democrat in Texas is a losing battle, and they figure we may as well give Ralph some votes) and very rarely go to church. In other words, I was raised by outsiders to be an outsider. I was specifically told never to say “ya’ll” or “ain’t,” and would be reprimanded if my parents detected any kind of twang. I was raised vegetarian in a county whose official food, if there was such a thing, would be brisket. And I was raised with the constant notion floating about my household that this place—with its fire ants, annual three-month drought, and 110-degree summers—was merely a temporary resting point before we all made our way back to the northeast.

Moving to New York was hardly a decision for me. After growing up with the constant notion of leaving, the only thing that seemed strange was when people asked if I would stay in Texas. Would I stay in Texas?! Of course not. The northeast, on the other hand, shone like some beacon of a promised land, the place where “my people” were, the place I would finally find a sense of place that made me feel at home.

That’s not really what happened when I moved to New York during the spring of my sophomore year of college. Sure, there are parts of New York that make me feel very welcome, a part of the city. I love Brooklyn, and the way so many neighborhoods are sprouting arts festivals, craft fairs—even writing workshops. I love walking around the West Village imagining Jack Kerouac planting his feet along the same worn streets I travel on. I even love going to midtown and imagining F. Scott Fitzgerald carousing through the nights with his crazy wife. But I am not a New Yorker—I’m still a visitor. There is nothing about the environment of New York—its subways, its grid, its constant movement—that really feels natural to me. It is not the home I was so long searching for in Texas.

But it is a home for me. Just like Texas is a home. Neither place ever felt like the quintessential idea of home to me, a place where I felt comfortable with everything. So I started wondering about what the sense of place was in each of them that made me feel some connection. For New York, I think it’s the history and the identity of the city that I relate to. A place is full of what happened in it before, and New York is always full of all the fascinating and wonderful things that happened before I moved here. For Texas, it is the environment more than the people that make me feel at home. The heat, the red dirt, the cicadas, the bats—all of these elements create the ideal home environment for me.

I think that many people probably feel conflicted about their home in some way, and it is that fascinating transition from one place to another that allows us to decipher the elements of a certain city or state that made it our home. A sense of place is not objective in memory—it is idealistic, sentimental, the best parts of something that we end up remembering. But maybe this remembered sense of place is the most real—it’s the sense of place that made us feel, at least a little bit, that we had made it home.