A reluctant Michigander

I am not a Michigander by birth or by choice.  I am a transplant, in much the same way a whirley tree-seed is lifted by the wind and deposited, and there it lays its roots without any say as to its location.  So too, here I have been deposited and my gnarly roots have stretched and now stubbornly hold tight to any number of unseen fast-holds.  I could be pulled up and moved across the way – but first I would have to disentangle myself from Michigan.

I am a transplanted southerner, in the long tradition of transplanted southerners, carried north by opportunity, though not my opportunity, but my father’s.  I am a Louisianan by birth, but my family spent the first few years bouncing back and forth between Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan.  Preschool, kindergarten and first grade were spent up north.  However, those years, and especially the years preceding them, remind me of a flash-back-memory-scene from so many movies.  The type of scene illustrated by photographs, or even better, silent home movies flashing images of family and play and holidays.  All snippets, with a narrative told over the arc of the montage.  Visions of a past life that slowly slip away.  I don’t remember the connecting parts of those memories, the sinew and muscle of the scenes, just the highlights that create more of an atmosphere than a comprehensive tale.

Of Gettysburg I have many fond, but scattered memories.  Perhaps it is because that was the age of discovery.  I was a preschooler and first encountering many things beyond the walls of home.  Everything seemed new and exciting.  Old churches, battlefields, girls, older kids...

Of Louisiana, I had the first feelings of independence and self identity.  I walked to school, independent of parents.  I could go where I wanted (okay, I always went to school).  I rode my bike far and wide: from the movie theater down the street to see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to my friends house a block over, to the Mississippi River a few blocks away.

But of Michigan (after we moved back when I was in fourth grade) the memories that stick out the most are only negative memories of the place (even despite good memories of a good many people).  Being moved away from a good friend down south.  The bitter cold of Michigan winter (compared with mild Louisiana winter – I never got into winter sports, and as a result I was a couch potato most of the frigid, frigid year).  The rough transition of being a new kid.  The awkwardness of middle school.  It was not till high school that I started to feel comfortable in my own skin in a social setting.  By that point, I had nothing but negative feelings about the state.  I admit that they were not rational, but they were firmly entrenched. 

And I kept finding more reasons to dislike living in the state.  I still hated the cold.  I watched too much local news and it made me hate Detroit (I realize now the problem with local news sensationalism).  I did not like living in the suburbs (still true).  I became a teenager, and therefore I did not like living with my family.  And my family lived in Michigan, so…

Then I went to college in Kalamazoo.  I really liked Kalamazoo.  So I made an exception for Kalamazoo and the surrounding environs (later I went to Lake Michigan and later still, Mackinac, and I made exceptions for those places too).

I graduated and moved back to Southeast Michigan.  I still did not like living in the Suburbs, but living near family had its advantages.  Plus, now I was living on my own–-out from under my parent’s roof.  But then I was trying to find a job, and since Michigan was the only state--not hit by a hurricane--to be in a recession in 2005, then I had that to dislike about Michigan!  And still I wanted to move!  And my illogical, passionate disdain for Michigan burned still deep inside me. 

But then we bought a condo (why?), and had another child (oh yeah), and now they are in school and I now I am in school and all my family’s here (after-all), and I do have a job, and we are never gonna be able to sell our condo in this economy... 

...and though I may be a transplanted Southerner, I have been gone nigh-on twenty years and would not likely feel at home in the south anyway.  And though Michigan has not grown on me, I once realized that I have grown in Michigan for nigh-on twenty years.  And so I have become a reluctant Michigander.