An unexpected homecoming
Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund
I left the screen door open as I unpacked another box. That way, I could see my daughter picking weeds out the side door of our little brick rental house. It was the first time I’d been able to let her go like that.
When we had a yard before, she wasn’t old enough to entertain herself with all the flowering weeds and stray mulch pieces.
It might be lodged in her memory, but she doesn’t ever talk about the time she spent in Missouri with a yard. We moved before she could verbalize her love of the outdoors. In New York, she would stand in every free space of grass she could find and trespass on neighbors’ tiny yards or tree lawns. In our third-floor walk-up there, I imagined raising a child in the city — unaware that it was only another exercise in growth and creativity.
Over the weekend, I returned to my hometown where my spouse has begun working at our alma mater and the same university where my father worked for almost 20 years. For as far-flung as I thought a sudden relocation to New York City, I would have never dreamed of a homecoming like this one.
On the cusp of my third trimester with my second child, I drove into a town changed but still familiar, and populated with many of the same faces I remember from childhood. They’re older now, and I wondered how long it would take to be recognized.
During the first morning at a playground, I ran into the same doctor who lived down the street from family while I grew up. He was the one we’d call if we had a question about something before we made an appointment. His daughter, who graduated a year ahead of me in school, was there visiting with her toddler son from the Detroit area. We introduced our children to each other and shared stories about our many moves. Within minutes, I saw another friend from high school walking with his wife and child, and one of my stepbrother’s college friends in the same park walking with his wife and two children.
At the grocery store, I walked with my older brother into a conversation with our former assistant principal at the high school. They talked shop about their administrative duties, and I tried to recall if the man carting around his kids talking to my brother had ever threatened me with detention. I decided he hadn’t but hid in the pasta aisle until I found the tactic useless. He needed something there, too.
By noon, my hopes for keeping a low profile vanished. Unless I never left my house, I would inevitably be confronted with the fact that I am now back home, living only a few hundred yards from where my father’s memorial tree is planted outside his work window, and only a short walk through a gravel driveway from the same building where I spent too many hours at the college newspaper office.
The prospect of raising children in New York stretched me because the environment and experience was so different from mine, but I’m presently concerned with how it will work out in a place that was never bad but one I ached to leave behind me. Some of my reasons might have been justifiable, and some only common among certain types of juveniles in the Midwest waiting to bust out and prove themselves.
My siblings and I joke that it’s only by divine appointment that my brother and I are living a few blocks from each other, and several of us are finding ourselves closer to each other than we’ve been in years. Perhaps it’s not as much of a joke as it is a blessing we never thought to pray too hard to receive but needed anyway.
Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t unload heavy boxes from the moving truck like I normally would. I would have felt embarrassed about my much altered state and inability to exert my strength, but some of my oldest friends were there to help. They were guys I remembered from church camp, high school parties, and long afternoons raking leaves for elderly friends. I have never been this tired in my life, and it felt so good to get hugs from people who knew me when.
Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund is a former news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum, now living and writing in Ohio.
