Something I can never explain, or even fully understand, pulled me back here.
– Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
When I read that line in Kingsolver’s essay, “Knowing Our Place”, I felt sad. It made me 
think of Detroit. Not because Detroit calls me back, but because I don’t feel anything about the city where I was born and raised. Sure, I visit at least once a year but only because my family lives there. I don’t feel any particular connection to the city. Oddly enough, I have come to appreciate Michigan’s beaches and quaint lakeside towns. But even then, I don’t feel as if Michigan is my home. It’s not my place. I admire it from the perspective of a traveler. If where we come from defines us, what happens when we feel dissociated and unconnected to that place?
View of the Riverwalk Quarry in Naperville, Illinois, USA from Eagle Street, near Jackson Street. Moser Tower is in the right-center background and Rotary Hill (serving as a sled hill) is in the left background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The only time I ever felt completed connected to my environment was when I lived in Naperville. It had all the amenities that were important to me: quiet neighborhoods, manicured lawns, friendly people and great shopping. And though I have never been the outdoorsy type, I loved being able to bike through the forest preserve, walk my dogs around the ponds in our subdivision and stroll along the river walk downtown. I was involved with my community. I had a sense of who I was in relationship to my place. I felt grounded in my role as a wife and mother. And when I left I was certain it would call me back. But when I returned to visit, it felt closed off and distant. I wasn’t a part of it and it wasn’t a part of me.
Now, I feel more like a nomad. And when you’re a nomad, it hard to know your place. You’re always thinking about where you’ve been or where you’re going.
There were times even in Naperville when I questioned whether or not I belonged there. Most often it was when I sat at my writing desk looking out over my neatly trimmed hedges at my backyard. I sensed there must be some place where I would feel more connected to who I was meant to be. And once I found that place, it would be easier to write.
Kingsolver suggest in her essay that the city is to blame for our lack of connectedness. There’s too much going on around us. We need to be more attached to the wilderness:
More than half of all humans now live in cites. The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture, and enterprise – the hominid agenda.
-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
I’m quite familiar with the “hominid agenda.” That’s what keeps me drawn to manmade chaos rather than the quiet and tranquility of nature. It makes me wonder if I don’t know my place because I haven’t accepted just how much Detroit has defined me. Perhaps all the activity in my head is ingrained in me. And though I’m a better writer when I’m a way from the steel jungle, I’m not completely comfortable outside of it.
Perhaps I appreciated nature in Naperville because it was controlled and safe. I had just enough city to be comfortable. But in Georgia, the idea of city is much different than Chicago or Detroit. There are trees and wooded areas. Consequently, I’ve driven home to find a hawk sitting on my gate. And have seen both coyote and deer run into the patch of trees on the corner. It unnerves me.
But Kingsolver writes, “Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it’s here that matters, it is place.”
And once we are comfortable with who we are, it doesn’t matter where we are.
