Jen's Column / Hometown

Hey everyone! Here's a preview of Wednesday's column. My birthday is actually tomorrow--but I had to write ahead! :), Jen

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Yesterday I celebrated my birthday. The 36th. It’s not one of the “big ones” — like 30, when you’re officially a grown-up. Or 40, when (I’m promised) you finally feel like you really know who you are and what you want out of life.

But it’s still a landmark birthday for me. Thirty-six is 18 doubled. Thirty-six means that I’ve now lived away from my hometown just as long as I lived in it.

Which is kind of a weird thing.

When I set off for college at 18, I suppose I figured I’d return home during the summers. But I never did. After my freshman year, my girlfriend Nenna and I headed west to South Dakota to spend the summer pushing free ice water at Wall Drug. After my sophomore year, my roommate Becky and I found a fabulous rental house that we didn’t want to give up — so we got jobs waitressing at a local restaurant and lived near campus year-round until graduation.

And that was that. I haven’t spent more than four or five consecutive nights in my parents’ house since.
It turns out that 36 isn’t too old to be a little sad about this.

There’s something about a hometown that is, well, home. This is not a unique epiphany. But this week, I admit to some sentimentality.

My hometown, Thief River Falls — a community of about 9,000 people in the heart of northwestern Minnesota’s snowmobile and hockey country — isn’t just where my parents still live. It’s where a great many of my most formative experiences and indelible memories were made.

It’s where Miss Cerne taught me to recite, “These are grandpa’s spectacles and this is grandpa’s cap…” in kindergarten. It’s where I walked across the stage during my high school graduation.

It’s where I learned to ride my first bike — an orange hand-me-down with rusty fenders. And it’s where I learned to drive my first stick-shift — a white hand-me-down with dented bumpers.

It’s where my two built-in playmates — sisters Amy and Angie — and I would erect forts in the woods and catch frogs in the ditch, seeing how many we could fit in our hands before they wriggled out. It’s where we’d meet up with neighbor kids on warm summer evenings for “night games” — hiding from each other under the deck during breathless, lightning-bug lit rounds of Kick the Can.

It’s where I spent countless hours in my basement bedroom listening to Def Leppard and Poison on the radio and talking to my girlfriends on the phone about what we were going to wear to school the next day.

It’s where I had my first crush — on a boy named Tony who leaned over my shoulder to help me tally my bowling score during phy. ed. class. It’s where I first fell in love — and where I first got my heart broken.

It’s the smell of my Grandpa Haugen’s basement and the taste of my Grandma Haugen’s molasses cake. It’s the feel of the velvet-like bark of my Grandma and Grandpa VanRooy’s climbing tree — and the sight of my Grandpa George’s reading light from the end of the driveway.

It was, for my first 18 years, a very small and safe world where everyone I loved was still alive and living within a five-minute drive. And I have a feeling that 18 — or even 36 — years from now, I will still have a soft spot for the small, safe world that was my hometown.