Often when I went out of state as a child, I wished I had grown up in the places I visited.
Whenever I stayed with my Buffalo cousins, I wished I had grown up on their grand island in the flow of the Niagara River. I wished I could have seen the Falls as often as I pleased and had a foreign nation a slap shot away. I wished I knew about hockey; I would have had a dog in the fights on the ice.
I would have learned to skate before I could walk and had the innate confidence to body check neighbors and cousins. I wished I knew what it was like to have feet of snow come down all winter-long and know which snow was best for snowballs or sleds or igloos. When I was up North, I was even envious of my cousins’ nasally accent, though they mocked my Southern one.
I traveled to my birth state of Texas, where my only memories are through home videos. While there, I felt my mamma should have let me grow up to be a cowboy. I dreamed my home was on the range and believed that everything was not only bigger but better in Texas.
When I visited Alaska, I was old enough to know I had no right to wear a shirt that read “Alaska Grown.” But boy, did I want to buy one! To see year-round snowcapped mountains, to need a snowmobile to get to my next-door neighbor and a plane to get out of town, to eat salmon caught in the Kenai: this is what it would have been like to have the Last Frontier for a backyard.
I now live that life vicariously as my son watches PBS Kids’ Molly of Denali. I am Scot of Denial.
In Colorado…well, it’s Colorado. Isn’t that everyone’s dream?
And time fails me to speak of the marionberries of Oregon and Vermont’s green mountains. Oh, that their taste and sight might be as familiar to me as the back of my hand! Then I would know more than I do now.
My wife spent her teenage years overseas. Meanwhile, being planted on one continent for thirty-one years is one of my greatest shames. Sure, I’ve been to more states than she has countries—but she’s been to more countries, and four continents. To know my way around international airports, to experience myriad cultures and cuisines, to pick up a second language by assimilation and not assignments: I wish I were so worldly.
Instead, I grew up in the largest city in Southwest Virginia. Floyd and Franklin County were a cultural experience for this slicker. But there’s a uniqueness to Roanoke that others may desire of the Star City what I did out of state: the bluegrass and Blue Ridge, having both the AT and the Parkway, and to know what it means that Virginia is for lovers.
My envy of another hometown isn’t an insecurity over being a Roanoker. It’s that the grass is always greener, and that I wanted to fit in wherever I was. When I was out of state, I experienced the bigness of the world; how people can live and think so differently, even in the same country. I am turning that envy into curiosity whenever I go out of state as an adult.
– Scot Bellavia