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
