Home, and the People We Bring with Us Along the Way

When I first started writing memoir in my junior year at Midd, I remember once in a story describing my childhood home simply as "typically suburban." My professor, always looking to pick apart an adjective (much less an adverb), asked me to better describe the place. I remember wondering, at the time, what more specific explanation was possible. "Suburban", a word which, admittedly, even now, rolls off my tongue with no small amount of disdain, seemed to me a very accurate description of a specific societal phenomenon. It wasn't until later that year when my then-boyfriend began to talk about his life in the suburbs of Boston that I began to realize that, though he was discussing a suburban life, it was a very different life than the one I so very determinedly believed embodied the term "suburbia." And so, when my friend Sue and I began discussing the places where we'd grown up, and she mentioned her home in the suburbs outside Detroit, I wondered: was our definition of "suburban" purely personal, as well?

Sue is coming to visit this weekend, a trip which I have, in some ways, been looking forward to for a year now. She will be the first of my friends from my life in the northeast ever to see me in the suburban southern habitat in which I grew up. The trip will likely be less eye-opening for Sue than it would be for other of my friends, as Sue is the one friend of mine from Vermont who's already tasted my grandmomma's biscuit recipe and heard the occasional country song escape my lips. She's heard me talk about the requisite acre lots on which the houses in my city sit and, yes, she's even caught the infrequent but oh-so-unforgettable slip of country twang in my accent. Still, though, there is a deepening of understanding of a person that comes with seeing the place in which that person was raised. I very much look forward to showing Sue where I come from, what "suburbia" has meant in my life.

Of course, I'll only be showing her the best parts of suburban southern culture--farmer's markets, hiking, dancing, evenings grilling out on the deck. None of the traditional suburban mainstays for these two girls. Starbucks and shopping malls, while they are certainly hallmarks of my city, don't even figure into my "suburbia". Ok, so Sue's visit to the south won't likely remind her or me of nights making the rounds at the bar circuit in Rutland or evenings under the stars near Lake Dunmore in Salisbury, or even weekends walking through the Middlebury town and campus, past the colorful houses and the gushing waters of Otter Creek. But I look forward to showing her a new side of myself, a place which has become home to me in a way it never was when I was a child. I look forward to showing off the place I come from, to remembering the place that became my home when I left here, and to talking about the place which will become my new home for the next two years. Sure, it will be hard to say goodbye to her when the weekend ends and it is time for her to return to the place where I often wish I, myself, were ready to make a home, but for now, I am just looking forward to one more great weekend with my good friend Sue.