I have often lamented the fact that there are very few photos of me as a child [aside from the requisite yearly school photo]. My parents just weren’t ‘picture people’, and the few dozen snapshots I do have were almost all taken on the same day each year — Christmas. 

Here, take a peep [hover your mouse over each photo – there are captions!]:

 

These were all taken before my family moved to Elmwood Place, where I spent most of my childhood. No, these were taken when we lived at the dog pound.

Yeah. You read that right.

I spent the first several years of my life living at the dog pound. The Cincinnati SPCA, to be exact. My dad ran the place, and it was like little kid heaven. I had entire rooms filled with dogs and cats to play with, and every once in a while, we’d get a really cool animal, like the peacocks we harbored in the backyard, or the parrot that lived on top of our washer for a few months, OH, there was the LION CUB who was in our living room! I snuggled a baby LION for a couple of days as a preschooler. No biggie. Just sitting here watching cartoons and playing with my temporary pet LION.

Why couldn’t they have taken photos of THAT? Geez.

Anyway. I digress.

Point being — I have all these cool memories, and hardly any photographic evidence to back them up. Maybe that’s why I’m so hell-bent on taking so many photos of everything, all the time.

When I was 12, I asked for a camera for Christmas, and I got it. A neon yellow, Kodak 110 point and shoot.  Then, when I was 16, a proper 35mm.

Jeez. I’m still on a tangent.

Okay, back to my ACTUAL TOPIC. Wait, have I even gotten to it yet?

This is like blog post whiplash today. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. Too much time in the car over the past few days with my own thoughts, coupled with a trip back to my hometown, has my brain all over the place.

That’s the point, I think.

The point is that, this past weekend, I went back to the tiny town I called home from the time I was 5 until I was 17, and it got me all up in my thoughts and feelings.

My family left the dog pound when I was almost 5, and moved to a teensy, tiny town outside of Cincinnati called Elmwood Place. It was TINY. Less than a mile square, population 2500…ish.

It was the place I’d roam the streets with friends, where I went to school, where I learned who I was, and what I wanted out of life. I knew every inch of that town, which never seemed to change.

Neither did our apartment, for that matter.

My parents placed the furniture on the day we moved in, and that furniture stayed where it was until the day I left for good, and beyond. And in that apartment, more Christmas photos were taken.

See?

 

Naturally, when I returned to Elmwood Place this past weekend….hang on. Another quick aside about why I was in Elmwood — my grandmother is across the river in KY, and my mom, who now lives in SC, was in KY visiting her. It’s my mother’s birthday today, my grandma was having a family reunion this past Saturday [haven’t been to one of those in more than a decade — that’s another post for a different day], and I thought that it would be a great birthday surprise for my mom if I just showed up, unannounced, at the reunion. It was a great surprise, and she was quite happy. Mission accomplished.

ANYWAY.

On my way back to PA, I decided to detour through my old hometown, and naturally, when I returned to Elmwood Place this weekend, these photos were playing on repeat in my mind.

It’s Christmas time again, and as I drove into town, I glanced up, and couldn’t help but notice that the decorations they have strung across the road are the SAME FREAKING DECORATIONS THEY HAD WHEN I WAS A KID.

Guys, I’m almost FORTY YEARS OLD.

I mean, the little paper lanterns are new, but the bells and lighted lamptop in the middle — yeah, totally leftover from the early 80s.

I pulled over in the middle of Vine Street and stared at them, remembering Christmases past.

It made me sad.

They weren’t cute and vintage. They were just….sad.

Clearly, no one had thought to keep them maintained by adding new tinsel as the old began to tarnish and fall off.

The bells that I remembered being fluffy, full, and sparkling red just look…..pathetic and shabby now.

Then I looked up and down the street, taking in the entire scene. It’s a view I saw a thousand thousand times as a kid….and in some respects, it was the same — all the buildings were still there, the decorations were the same….

The street itself hadn’t changed much at all.

BUT.

It was so completely different from the street I remember.

It lacked LIFE.

I found myself driving through a town that has given up. It was clear. They just don’t care any more. Buildings were shuttered. Garbage and litter laid in the yards and on the streets.

The tattered Christmas decorations swayed haphazardly in the winter wind.

It was just sad.

It was always a working class town. No one would ever call Elmwood Place fancy when I lived there, but we took pride in it. We were happy there. It was full of life.

And here I was, back again, 20 years later, and it felt like an entirely different place — a place at once so familiar and so unknown that I didn’t know what to make of it.

I drove up to my old street, and was so shocked and horrified that I couldn’t bring myself to even snap a photo.

The beautiful trees I planted from seeds are almost all gone. There were a dozen lining the street when I left — all big and beautiful, framing the block, providing shade, and some, fruit.  Now, the only ones left are a bedraggled peach tree that is so cut back and hacked at that it’s a wonder it lives at all, and my beloved maple, planted outside my old bedroom, still reaching toward the sky, at least 7 stories high now, but scraggly from years of not being pruned, fertilized, or cared for.

And the buildings.

Oh my god, the buildings.

What was once lovingly referred to as “Bill Kapp’s mini-UN” is gone. The circle of flagpoles -gone. The rose garden on the corner, gone. The community parking lot is crumbling, filled with huge pot holes resembling muddy craters.

The tiny, one block street of 4 buildings on one side and 5 on the other has been all but abandoned.

I didn’t stay long, nor did I get out of my car. It felt…unsafe. And certainly not like home.

As I drove out of town, I found myself remembering a night in my dorm, my freshman year of college. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and almost everyone had gone home. I was alone in the dorm, and found myself crying in the community room while watching the “friends” Thanksgiving special. The resident director came by, sat down, and asked why I was crying – if I was homesick.

“Yes,” I replied, “But I’m homesick for something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

My parents had moved to SC shortly after I’d graduated, and the home I’d known most of my life was gone. I desperately wanted to go home, but couldn’t. I didn’t know where I belonged. I knew that I didn’t belong in Elmwood Place — I never really had fit in there — but it had been my home.

And now, as I drove out of Elmwood Place, 20 years later, I found myself thinking about how that felt — of not having a place to go back and call home.

I spent the first 12 years of my after-college adult life working for The Salvation Army as an officer, moving to a different assignment in a different state every 18 months to two years. I’d lived all over the east coast, at this point. And inevitably, people would ask me, “So where’s home for you?” And I never knew how to answer that.

Elmwood? No….I had roots there, but didn’t have people there anymore.

South Carolina? No……I had people there, but no roots.

So I finally settled on the answer of “home is wherever the army sends me, but I grew up outside Cincinnati.”

And even after I left the army, I shortened it to a simple, “I grew up outside Cincinnati.”

I thought about Elmwood Place’s slide into disrepair and abandonment all the way through Ohio on my way back to PA yesterday.

As I passed different exits on the highway, I saw snapshots in my mind of moments from my childhood.

Exit 8 – my hometown.

Exit 7 – my high school.

Ronald Reagan highway – how I got to church.

Exit 36 – the summers at camp.

Trader’s World. Mt. Vernon. Columbus. The wedding in Zanesville the day after the tornado.

On and on.

And yet, I felt like an outsider, like a tourist passing through.

I mulled this feeling for 5 hours as I drove through the state, until I crossed a metal bridge over the Ohio river.

I felt my body start to relax, and then realized that, at the sight of a road sign, I’d broken into a huge grin.

WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA. PURSUE YOUR HAPPINESS.

All it once, the realization hit me.

I am finally home.