Homesick for the Midwest

Managing the push and pull of having my heart in two places

Chicago has been on my mind a lot this week. Thanks to the recommendation of my dear friend Nathalie, we’ve started watching The Bear: a show about a Michelin Star chef who returns from New York to Chicago to run the family restaurant after his brother’s suicide. We gave this show a whirl last year, but stopped after a couple of episodes as I found it too full on for my delicate nervous system. If you’ve not seen it yet, there’s lots of raised voices, and kitchen noise, and scenes depicting a ‘sense of urgency’ that gave me flashbacks to all the busiest and most stressful days I’ve ever worked in a kitchen. I decided that wasn’t what I needed in my life, and we packed it in. However, after hearing Natto’s glowing review, and knowing that I always love everything she sends my way, we decided to give it another try.

It was worth it. Once I got past the initial couple of episodes and became used to ALL THE SHOUTING, it started to grow on me. I have a soft spot for Jeremy Allen White, who played my favourite character, Lip, in Shameless, for a start. It’s also a wonderful study in character - people who are all kinds of broken: mostly on the edge of cracking up, but still attempting to show up. The writing is beautiful, thoughtful, funny. The entire cast feels born to play their parts. And to top it off, the soundtrack is really wonderful: songs that feel like they’ve been written especially for it. When Let Down by Radiohead kicked in, in the final episode of season 1, I lost it for a moment, and who can argue with anything that kicks off with Refused’s New Noise?

Another reason I’ve enjoyed the show so much is because of how firmly it is situated in Chicago, a place that Karl and I felt was our second city when we lived in Detroit. We must have visited 5 or 6 times, and it was the first trip we took outside of the D during the first Spring we lived in Michigan. We went back there for an education conference, and to Lolapalooza with our best friends. When my dad visited, he flew into Chicago, and we met him there before taking an epic drive to Yellowstone. I also took the train over for a whirlwind day-trip with my mum. 

The first time we ever visited, it was damp and cold. The skyscrapers were shrouded in mist, and it was impossible to tell where the lake ended and the sky began. Despite the conditions, we had a really great time. We wandered the streets for hours, simultaneously delighted and freaked out by how busy it was in comparison to Detroit’s empty downtown. After 6 months of change, of trying to settle in Detroit, it was like being on holiday. Everything felt expansive and possible again. I fell in love with the emerald river that winds its way through the city centre, and the cherry tree lined avenues alongside the lake, and the brownstones in the quieter residential neighbourhoods. There was a lot of green space, a lot of joggers. It reminded me of Sydney.

In The Bear, many episodes begin with montages of the city itself and feature a lot of familiar sights: the skyline, Lakeshore Drive, the Navy Pier, the L train, the Marina City car park. District names like River North and Lincoln Park ding long buried memories in my brain, and bring up a mix of nostalgia and longing. This feeling has arisen periodically since we moved back from the States. It catches me at odd moments, and I’m sometimes seized by a Proustian Rush esque sensation: of familiarity, recognition, memory.

This sensation is particularly present when I see something depicted on screen that reminds me of our old home. During the first few months we were back in the UK, we went to the cinema to see the film Dark Waters, which focused on the extensive poisoning of a West Virginian town by chemical giant DuPont. I found the film affecting - not because of the subject, or the acting, or the delivery - but for the location. It was filmed in winter, in Ohio, in the heart of the Midwest, and so many scenes, particularly those of the residential neighbourhoods, are almost identical to where we used to live in Ferndale. There was nothing extraordinary happening on screen - just streets of timber clad houses, all slightly different, each one with a front porch, or shots from car windows of green road signs (including directions to the I75 freeway; the road we took to work every day) - but I had a pang to be there. They were simple, every day, unremarkable images, but I recognised them. In a moment, it brought home to me the strangeness of having two homes: how odd it was that the scenes playing out on screen were as familiar to me as the country lanes and pebbled beaches of Sussex.

The same thing has been happening these past couple of weeks as I watch The Bear. The other day, it was a simple shot of a residential Chicago road that kicked me in the guts. The road had cars parked either side, buildings surrounded by chain link fences, some traffic lights, some road signs. Snow was clearly in the air. The weather: bleak; the sky awash with grey. It was completely incidental to anything going on in the show, but it was the scene that stuck with me. I wanted to be there. I know what being outside in that weather feels like (hint: fucking freezing), and I missed it. I never thought I’d miss that cold weather. I hate the cold. And yet.

Ever since the great Detroit experiment, I’ve been interested in the way in which we long for what we don’t have. It’s a particular human thing: this ‘grass is greener’ mentality. When we lived in America, I pined for the UK: for the white cliffs, for nature, for the flowers and trees and plants that I recognised. For the landscapes and the sea. I found the Midwest stark and cold and devoid of life. In winter especially - those long, interminable winters - it felt so washed out, so empty of beauty. 

Now, when I see it depicted on the screen, I feel the loss of it, like little waves of grief. In these moments, fleeting as they are, I’d give anything to live back in Detroit. I want to experience just one really cold day: for the icy air that burns my chest; for the soft hush of a morning where the snow doesn't stop falling for hours. I miss my little blue house. I miss sitting out on the front porch steps and watching the light change. I miss seeing the flash of a cardinal's red wings in the tall pine tree next to my house.  I miss Americans - their warmth and openness, their enthusiasm, their interest, their appetite for more. I miss my friends - the few people I worked with and socialised with and shared our Detroit life with - so much.

I even miss things that I never thought I would; things that I thought were strange and ugly when I first arrived; things like the illuminated signs and the strip malls. Family Dollar. McDonalds. CVS. I miss sitting in the backseat, driving home late, drunk, watching those same signs flit by; having the realisation that I live in Michigan, and not in England. It always happened in the car at the end of a night out, always that strange sense of dislocation mingled with deep peace - that I was there, in America, living a new and different life.

The hardest part about leaving America was the finality of it all. I remember talking to a friend before we left, about the ups and downs that we'd experienced over the 5 years we’d been there. I said that the life we'd created hadn't been easy, but it was still a life. A life that we built and nurtured, and that we derived joy from. It’s bittersweet, here on the other side of that life, to know that we’ll never live it again. Yes, we'll visit and take trips, but we won't live there. We won’t experience the day-to-day of that place. Our friendships - even with our Detroit besties who live in the UK - will always be fleeting trips and facetimes, rather than the easy intimacy of working together, spending weekends together, or living on the next street. Sometimes the weight of it knocks the wind out of my sails. 

It feels weird to think of grieving for a life when you’re still alive. It’s not grief in the conventional sense. Of course, living in a different place is life changing for many. It happens all the time: moving out of home for the first time, going to university, or moving to different cities, living with different people. But a lot of that stuff happens when you’re young and breathless and excited. It feels normal for things to be transient, and for friendships and living arrangements to evolve. There’s something about the fact that I uprooted myself in my mid-thirties (and mid-forties for Karl) that feels different to those earlier relocations. At that point in time, we were settled, we were happy, we thought our life was on a particular trajectory, and then it changed. The Detroit experience was also very self-contained: a five-year period within which a life happened. It was obvious, and it had a cut-off point. It had a beginning, middle and end. It had a birth, a life, and a death.

Grief has been a major preoccupation of mine, particularly for the last three or four years, but sitting amongst the grief for babies that did not make it, and for parents and friends (not to mention the collective grief of millions of people who lost loved ones during the pandemic), is this grief for our old life. Superficially, it feels less significant in that stellar line up of loss, but sometimes it feels harder. There’s not the sense of finality that comes with the death of a loved one. Detroit is still there. Our house is still there. Our American family is till there. Life is happening much the same as it always did, only we’re not there in it. It’s something that’s lost, and I can’t get back. 

Of course life goes on (and it has), and as with all my grief, over time, that feeling of loss lessens. Soon we’ll have been back in the UK for longer than the time we lived in the US. And so much has happened in that time, and now we’ve moved again. I haven’t had the same pangs for Sussex since we’ve been in Wales. Part of it is because it’s the same country and I know that if I wanted to, I could get in the car and be there in 5 or 6 hours. The other is because much of our life feels the same as the life we were living in Sussex before we moved. The location has changed, but there's consistency in many things.  When we lived in the States, everything was different. There was something about the Atlantic Ocean being in the middle, too. The sense that so much is, on the surface, the same, but actually it’s a whole other country, a whole other culture. And it was ours for a bit.

I want to go back. The other day, I told Karl I had unfinished business with America: all the multiple trips and cities we never managed to fit in. It’s going to be a while before we get there, so for now I’m going to console myself with watching The Bear. I’ll let myself pine after grim, Midwestern, winter days, and laugh at how ridiculous I am. I’ll accept the fact that I’ll always have my heart in two homes (and be grateful that its the case). I’ll also do my best to keep both feet in this life; to be more present in the here and now. To notice the green grass under my feet.

The Bear: excellent TV (just be prepared for the noise)