Lift Up Your Hearts!

A common theme over at the Front Porch Republic is a respect for place: for home and community, for not only eating locally but being locally, staying in (or returning to) one's hometown rather than venturing off to "better" places.  The article Root Hog or Die is where I chose to ask a question that has been bothering me about this approach to life, much as I like some of the ideas.

I’ve moved enough times in my life to know I hate it. (The only time I didn’t was when moving from an apartment to our first house, just a few blocks away.) I grieve that my present grandchildren live an 18-hour drive away, and some future grandchildren are likely to grow up where I can’t visit them without a passport. Our extended family makes a point of getting together at least twice a year—but that’s not the same as being able to drop by my nephew’s house for an impromptu cello concert, or to comfort my grandson when he is sick.

That said, I want to ask a question that has bothered me ever since I first encountered the stay-home ideas here at the FPR. Having done extensive genealogical research, I know that the best thing my maternal great-grandparents did for me was to get out of their West Virginia town. Among those who remained, the incidence of “father unknown” on the birth records is depressingly high.

Moreover, I noticed that each of my hated moving experiences provoked growth in my life and that of others. In my own (highly-rated) high school the brightest, most interesting students were almost always those who had come from elsewhere, not because of any deficiencies in the local population, but because the non-locals had a wider range of experience from which to draw. I like to think our different perspectives brought enrichment to our fellow-students as well.

I wish we could have it both ways. Home, as my friends and family will assure you, sometimes with exasperation, is my favorite place to be—wherever home happens to be at the moment. I wish my entire family were no more than an hour’s drive away instead of spread across the country and the globe. But living, at least for a while, in Japan, and Costa Rica, and Switzerland, and Italy, and yes, Pennsylvania, Florida, Washington, Massachusetts, and many other states, in small towns and suburbs, in cities and on farms, has brought such richness to our family that I wouldn’t have it otherwise.

How does the philosophy I see here at the FPR allow for such enrichment, such growth, such joys?

If there's a good response I'll include it here in the comments.

What is my home? Eastern upstate New York, where I grew up?  Eastern Pennsylvania, where I also grew up?  Western New York, where our children were born?  Florida, our home for most of the last quarter-century?  My two parents and four grandparents were born in New York, Washington, West Virginia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Florida—representing the middle and three of the four corners of this continental United States.  How far back do I go to find my "family" home? Do I go back to England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, or the Netherlands?

These ruminations were sparked in part by what I learned recently about the Swiss system of citizenship, which perhaps reflects, at least in principle, the rootedness extolled at the FPR.  Swiss people are not citizens of Switzerland, per se, but of their family’s home town, which may be neither the place they were born nor a place they have ever lived.  Children and wives take on the citizenship of the father/husband, which probably would make me a citizen of Quidnessett, Rhode Island, if not of somewhere in England. Mindboggling.

Ancestral lands or no, "home" to me would ideally have all family members (children parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, in-laws) living close enough together for casual visits, mutual support, and tremendous Memorial Day picnics, while at the same time providing for all the enrichment of life that comes from extended immersion in other cultures, both the cultures of foreign lands and the alien cultures in our own country.  (If you doubt we have alien cultures in our own country, you've never experienced the contrast between New England and the South, let alone Middle America and California.)  So it's impossible:  but what kinds of attitudes and actions could bring us closer to the ideal?