Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

I’m not the one moving, and yet it seems as though I’m leaving a piece of myself behind. My ninety-two-year old mother is moving from Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester, where she has lived since 1959. With the exception of breaks for college (her B.A and Dad’s advanced degrees) she’s been in the Rochester area since 1936. It’s not a move she wants to make, rather one her children decided was necessary to provide her better support.

I called the Rochester area home (with two years out while Dad got his PhD from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. where I learned to talk Southern, y’all) until March 1972 when I moved to New Jersey for my first professional job. I’ve periodically returned to visit my parents and for a couple of high school reunions. However, even a generous count of my time back in town might reach one percent of the 16,000+ days since I left home—not exactly making me a poster child for staying strongly connected with the area.

So why my feeling of loss? I don’t think it has anything to do with people. I still have one sister who lives in the area, so not all family connections are severed. None of my close friends have lived in town since shortly after our college days, so that’s not it.

It’s not an attachment to the old family homestead. My parents sold that decades ago and moved to a condo and sold that ten years ago and moved into independent living. I’ve driven past the house I grew up in. It looks much the same, although the trees are much larger—or missing—and there is nothing there that tugs at my heartstrings.

And it’s not Lake Ontario I miss. We now live on a small inland lake not far from Lake Superior, and I never spent much time on or around the lake in any event.

That only leaves the surrounding landscape.

Driving from Michigan, we cross through Canada and reenter the U.S. at Lewiston, N.Y. Mapping software would have us drive south on interstates to the Thruway (I-90), then drive east, and finally back north. I chose the alternate route of taking NY-104 directly east. It follows a ridge all the way from the Niagara Escarpment well past Rochester. On the north, it quickly drops from the ridge to a plain that runs to Lake Ontario. To the south are the long rolling hills that lead to the Finger Lakes and then down to the Southern Tier.

Apples, pears, and cherry trees still dot the landscape. Fields of wheat, corn, and vegetables now share the landscape with vineyards. There are more fallow fields and fewer dairy cows than there used to be, resulting in more tree lots. The small towns remain much as they were fifty years ago, although many hollowed out by the loss of industry are now making up for the loss by importing commuters to nearby cities.

On our drive through Michigan’s Mitten, we pass through Genesee County. That’s a bit curious because the Genesee River is a major river in New York, not Michigan. Flowing north, it drains a large swathe of Western New York into Lake Ontario through a series of falls in Rochester, the falls that made Rochester the original “Flour City” when upstate New York was the breadbasket of the country. Many town names in that portion of Michigan had been lifted by their settlers from New York, just as many Massachusetts town names were hauled across the sea from native England.

We carry the names from our landscapes with us, a reminder of where we’ve been, what we’ve left behind, perhaps what we wish to recreate. When I close my eyes and reimagine the road trips I’ve taken through the general area in which I grew up, the hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, towns and cities are burned into my memory.

I think I’m sad that I’ll not have a built-in reason to wander the area again. Having written this, I’m now smiling because no matter where I am, it’s the landscape I think of as home.

~ Jim