Wednesday, September 22, 2021 // The Statement — 4

BY OSCAR 

NOLLETTE-PATULSKI, 

STATEMENT COLUMNIST

As I walk past the Undergraduate 

Science Building, the early September 
sunset paints a gradient from blue to 
orange on the reflective windows. I 
should be wowed by this: the brilliant 
sky, the comfortably warm weather, my 
first week back on campus. Instead, my 
mind wanders back to the streets of my 
youth. The suburban ones with single-
family ranches dotting the sides of the 
road, the quiet ones that couldn’t quite 
keep high-school me satisfied, the long 
ones that had iterations of car dealerships 
and fast-food restaurants for miles. The streets 
that resemble a midwest automobile wasteland. 
Yet here I was, eight days after moving in, yearn-
ing to touch the ground that I had so happily left. 

How did I get here?
I have lived in Grand Rapids, Mich., for the vast 

majority of my life, only moving once before that 
from Brooklyn, N.Y. This first move happened 
just after kindergarten, and by the time first grade 
was over, I had thoroughly exhausted my teachers 
and peers with my fun fact about being from the 
Big Apple. How many five-year-olds can say they 
just came from the cultural center of the Western 
world? At North Park Elementary, I was the only 
one, and took a unique pride in where I was born, 
despite only having lived there for five years — 
eighteen months of which I actually remember. 

This affection for New York stood in stark 

contrast to my feelings towards Grand Rapids. 
Our modest yard, which enthralled my urbanite 
parents, did not live up to the hype (in my five-
year-old opinion). The grass was brown and dry 
from midsummer’s heat and prickled the soles of 
my feet with disdain. In Michigan, there was no 
subway system to whisk our family around, only 
minivans and five-lane roads. The crickets and 
cicadas nonstop symphonies scared my brother 
and me to tears while trying to sleep on our first 
night. The city — or should I call it a town — was 
too small and too far away from the childhood I 
knew and loved. 

This negative first impression of Grand Rapids 

created a pessimistic lens through which I viewed 
the city for the remainder of my time there. It was 
much too hot and humid in the summers, with 90º 
becoming less foreign and more annoying. The 
limited activities within walking distance weren’t 
as much as a problem while my younger brother 
and I required parental supervision, but as we grew 
independent, the entertainment desert that existed 
within our lush, tree-lined streets became painful-
ly obvious. By high school, my friends and I would 
simply drive from strip malls to chain restaurants 

and 
back again, the asphalt roads a conduit to a cure 
for boredom. Exciting events on the weekend 
included hunting the aisles of big box stores for 
Squishmallows or discount holiday candy, a place 
to exist away from our families and school. 

I had always hoped that my parents would 

move somewhere else, swooped to the West coast 
by the winds of a new job, or a lack of inspiration 
from this silly midwest river town. They con-
sistently lamented the conservative politics, the 
name of rich corporate executives plastered on 
every vertical surface and the culture scene that 
was small enough to make their art school sensi-
bilities feel claustrophobic. Somehow, my father’s 
sisters and mother were enough of a glue for us to 
stay put, and my parents have now lived there lon-
ger than they did in the Big City. I graduated high 
school with the determination to not do the same.

And so I ended up in Ann Arbor, barely say-

ing goodbye to my dad when he dropped me off 
at East Quad Residence Hall on that late August 
afternoon. There were things I missed about 
home of course: my cats, my family, my own space. 
Nevertheless, I relished my freedom in a new city. 
Stringing together extended itineraries of campus 
events, bike rides to new parts of the surround-
ing city, trying new dining halls and eateries 
under the changing leaves and crisp skies of fall. 
I avoided home over Fall Break, instead opting for 
a backpacking trip in the Upper Peninsula. By the 
time Thanksgiving recess appeared on my calen-
dar, my parent’s house was foreign. Even though 
it felt good to be home for the holidays, my Grand 
Rapids cabin fever caught up to me by Christmas, 
and Ann Arbor was the place I would have rather 
been.

Similarly, winter semester went by without visit-

ing home once, until University Housing’s infamous 
pandemic email kicked me and my hallmates out of 
the dorms. In an instant, living with my parents in 

Grand 

Rapids went from a rarity to reality. There was a 
sense of premature conclusion when my mom 
and I pulled into the driveway of my childhood 
home, under the drab gray sky of mid-March. 
Though I felt a new sense of ease, this breath 
of release from uptempo university life soon 
became a sleepy trudge through online school. 
My decorated desk at school was now a laptop 
on top of a clothing storage bin. My limbs hurt 
in this crouched position, their only movement 
being between computer tabs. My need for vari-
ety hurt as well. I did homework, interspersed 
class with three half-prepared meals, watched 
TV and went to sleep, all within 20 paces of each 
other. As final exams faded into early summer, I 
woke up in the same bed, ate the same food and 
lived with the same people. The only ounce of 
change I experienced was the season I saw out-
side my window.

I sought to make some change for myself, and 

rode my bike extensively around the city on my 
days off from my return at my high school job. I 
rode along rivers, traced trails and biked through 
the sloping subdivisions and tired traffic lights of 
my hometown. Without the typical hum of mid-
westerners driving the streets, the city spoke for 
itself in a way. I went through neighborhoods I 
knew existed but never got to know, digging into 
the landscape that shaped my youth, stripped 
back from the rhythms of daily life.

By the end of that monotonous stay-at-home 

summer, I was ready to move back to Ann Arbor, 
even if it only was for a new laptop background. 
I felt like I knew Grand Rapids, or at least a ver-
sion of it, inside and out, and a change of scenery 
was necessary. I vowed to never spend that much 
time at my parent’s house again. I quickly accus-
tomed myself to a new routine, immersing myself 
in the new hybrid world of school and work for 
the semester.

Once in a while, I would see class-

mates from high school walking 
through the nearly empty landscape 
of a university online. We would talk, 
trade surface-level feelings and anec-
dotes, before eventually turning to 
Grand Rapids as something we had 
in common. Through these conver-
sations, we shared snapshots of our 
favorite views coming into the city: 
the skyline rising in the distance driv-

ing north on US-131, the lookout from 

the west side bluffs looking over the river. 

These were visual cues of knowing that we 

were home, we were safe and we would soon be in 
the calm of our childhood bedrooms. This came 
as a surprise for me: actively wanting to return to 
my roots. This initial feeling of familiar comfort is 
what I realized I miss most about being home, and 
the thought of upcoming semester breaks tempt-
ed me to relive that experience. 

Distance makes the heart grow fonder, and 

the same proved true about Grand Rapids. 
Though there was less to do than ever dur-
ing my extended pandemic stint at my par-
ent’s house, something about the homogenous 
nature of my time at home made that okay, and 
made me appreciate the calmness of society’s 
relative standstill. I became more comfortable 
with boredom, and more mundane activities 
like going on walks and waving to neighbors 
became highlights of my existence. I once 
despised the place I came from because it was 
so familiar, so last year, so boring. To be sepa-
rated from my former self by geography was 
something I was grateful for. However, being 
away from home has illuminated facets of a 
more reliable daily routine that I now miss, and 
places that I once dismissed as too suburban, 
too normal, glimmer positively in my memory. 

This past summer, in an effort to differenti-

ate from that of 2020, I took jobs that pulled me 
away from Grand Rapids, and I was gone from 
my parent’s home save a couple of weeks in May 
and some days in August. I relished my indepen-
dence and freedom that came with the distance, 
but perhaps I did not give myself enough breath-
ing room, forgetting about the valuable oxygen 
that comes with leisure time at home — the sense 
of refreshment it gives before moving on to a new 
academic year. I underestimated my hometown, 
and upon my eventual return, I hope that I will 
savor the sunsets that reflect off my living room 
window; coloring my childhood street with a 
rose-colored tint, and my memories of it the 
same.

Giving 

hometowns 

a second 

chance

Design by Madison Grosvenor