What Is Home, Exactly?
For the first ten years of my life, I had four constants: the other members of my family.
My dad was in the Air Force, so we moved just enough for us to never really settle.
(England was close, but I'm not sure if it was being there four years, or the knowledge that my mum's family was just a drive away. I still think of Cambridge as home sometimes, and often think what if my father had retired there.)
I think a lot of people would benefit from the experiences I had. Even though my journey was mostly Western European, the culture changes were significant enough. To this day I still sometimes roll my eyes and mutter Americans, even though I am one. I occasionally pronounce zebra with a short e sound, and put the letter u next to the letter o in several words.
I've lived in Ohio for twenty years now, and I don't think I will ever quite find myself calling myself a native. It's definitely home: my family is here, and the list of things I like about it still outweigh the things I don't.
But I find it endlessly fascinating that even within where I am, there are vast shifts. I work in the city but drive not even thirty minutes from down town, and it's corn and soybeans and tractors. I student taught in a school district not five minutes from where I live, and the differences from my own high school experience and innumerable.
When I first moved here, I tried desperately to fit in, to find myself as a part of a larger whole. In some ways, I'm still doing so. But it doesn't really matter, because the cultural experience I've had is even unique from the people I shared ten years of commonality with. What's truly important is that I accept where people came from, and that just because I didn't experience it, doesn't mean that it isn't valid, or acceptable.
I may never bleed scarlet and gray, and the word pop may never come from me in reference to fizzy sugar drinks, but I am just as much at home here as anyone else.