The Case for Moving Back to Your Hometown

"Bumfuck nowhere,” “part of the country that needs to die off already,” a “nowhere place”: It was a jolt to hear how other people—well-intentioned friends or bosses or random strangers I met in passing—referred to the place I knew as home.

Home is writing these words at the long kitchen table that my grandfather built as a gift for my mother. It’s the smell of my mom’s lemon cake and coffee wafting through the house, the neighbors I used to see every year as a child at our street-wide chili potlucks on Halloween. That’s how I think of it now. But for the majority of the time I spent growing up here, I thought of home as a waiting room, the place I had to be until I could go somewhere else.

Read Full Article »