Category Archives: small town USA

Looking for your Childhood

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I used to have a wooden plate from when I lived in Germany. Around the rim it said

Wo do als Kind gespielt and gesung der Glocken der Heimat sind nicht verkglungen

Word for word translated, where you played and sang as a child, the bells of homeland never stop ringing.

It’s an interesting concept, contrasted to “You can’t go home again,” because after a speaking at a conference in Ohio (talking about medical mistrust and rural rage) I went out to my grandparents’ old farm. It’s not a farm anymore. The pond has been filled in and the dirt driveway that led to their 80 acres of cows and trees was now paved drive shared by three houses going back into the former pasture. Another big beautiful pre-fab aluminum sided house that screamed “we’re retired” had gone up across the street, on top of the ridge for the best view.

We grew up in innocence. Nanny’s house was amazing because it had curtains instead of walls. It had light in daylight and after dark you saw thousands of stars and lightning bugs, and you got to work an oil lamp. Handling matches at eight years old was so cool. The music came from whistling and singing – although Nanny had things to say about whistling girls and crowing hens.

This is the second time I’ve been back there since we all moved away for good, and it’s kinda funny that both visits have been after some milestone of professional accomplishment. In 2018 I was writer in residence at Lafayette Flats, an amazing artistic opportunity that resulted in one of my books (Bad Boy in the Bookstore, my first full-length fiction). This time I was the established expert on rural rage and medical mistrust–something NPR put an interview out on in their THROUGHLINES podcast the same day I spoke.

And both times, I was looking for something that wasn’t there, at the old home place. My childhood. That innocence of how sweet it was to be loved in this weird and wonderful house where my grandparents didn’t have enough money to fill in their framed walls with lumber and hung curtains instead. Best hide and seek games ever. We could run over those hills and nothing but a skunk would harm us. Sweet freedom, happy blissful ignorance of why people lived on borrowed land and took part of their garden produce to that rich guy in town.

Forty years later, drove along Nanny and Grandpa’s old road, which didn’t used to have a name. It was just Rural Route 40, and their house sat between Big Hill and Little Hill. So we called the road that ran out front–the same road–Big Hill Road if you turned right and Little Hill Road if you turned left. And we loved riding our bikes between them very fast. Nanny’s house was the center of this small, safe universe.

Reconciling what I know now with what I loved then made for a bittersweet drive as my Prius went down Little Hill and up Big Hill. The road is called Bethel now, and it has a post office address in New Plymouth–which is still a wide spot in the road. You went out Little Hill Road for the airport, which was a great place to ride bikes. They would shoo you off the runway if a plane was coming–which never happened.

Vinton County Airport still does small planes only. And my heart still lives, at least part-time, between Big Hill Road and Little Hill Road.

You can go home again. You just have to be prepared to fold the truths into the innocence and take it in as part of adulting. It doesn’t negate the memories. Perhaps it even sweetens them. Here’s to you, Vinton County.

Two Porches

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Attending the graduation ceremony of a friend recently, the extended chosen family piled into a VRBO high in the North Carolina mountains. It was literally atop a luxury gated community, part of a system of homes in a rabbit warren of “get the best views” homes pushed into the sides of the mountain. And there was a golf course.

Four bedrooms and a communal gathering space upstairs and down gave each of the four couples privacy and community. The huge back porch looked toward the ridge on the other side of the valley. It was, in a word, picture perfect.

And it reminded me of another porch: my grandmother’s, out there in Vinton County, Ohio. My bet is whoever owned the house we were in and the house next door to it (iron gates on a timer, an irrigation system to aid the flowering trees, and a turret on the side of the colossal home) could have pooled their pocket change and bought Vinton County.

Grandma’s house didn’t have walls, just the studs, because they ran out of building money. Growing up, I thought it was the coolest place in the world because you could slip between rooms without using the door. And her porch, about the size of a king sized quilt, was the best star gazing territory in the world, because they didn’t use electric lights for the first eight or so years of my visits there. Couldn’t afford it.

Nanny’s porch looked across a pasture to distant mountains, and the lights of the small town nestled in the valley between just peeped over the grass, making it look like our own private sunset every evening.

We cooked skillet suppers on her wood stove, and the fact that took twice as long to heat anything up meant we got to talk more. And that Nanny could show me how to peel carrots correctly, in what order to put in the veggies and herbs she foraged or grew in her garden.

At the North Carolina B&B, Brandon’s father-in-law made us a skillet breakfast of venison from his hunting trips, coupled with fluffy biscuits from a can and eggs from our homestead. We went out to eat at a special celebrational place serving deluxe burgers and craft brews.

It was a delight to sit on that huge screened-in back porch in North Carolina, replete with a lovely meal, sipping gin fizzes and celebrating our friend Brandon’s success in school and enjoying each other’s company while counting shooting stars. It was a delight to sit as a cherished grandchild on my grandmother’s porch sipping lemonade, belly full from the skillet supper, slapping mosquitoes while counting shooting stars.

Maybe it’s who you’re with, maybe it’s what you look at, maybe it’s how you see. Joy is in a lot of places and while I don’t for a minute romanticize poverty, I also don’t discredit how happy people can be, sitting on the porch with the lights off for whatever reason, enjoying themselves, each other, and the night sky.