A completely cliche and sappy take on learning to love and appreciate the place I grew up.
Slight reintroduction
For those who are reading this that I have not had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Nikara Garretson, and I am from New Milford, Connecticut. I know I really strayed far from home coming all the way from one rural part of CT to another patch of farmland in this great state. While I’ll spare you the boring aspects of myself such as major and grade and blah blah blah, I think it’s important to note I never wanted to come to the University of Connecticut, in fact it was the very last place I have ever intended to end up (said every CT senior in high school ever). But alas, when March came on the eve of my graduation, I made the utterly random decision to commit to the school I had once claimed to loathe simply because it was located in the state of my birth. And in the unsurprising turn of events, I have come in the last year and a half of being here to whole heartedly love it. So much so that being here has become a second home to me, and for nine months out of the year, I feel as though I am in my own world. And truly between the student body environment and the fact that we are literally surrounded for miles by nothing but barns and cows, it does feel like its own ecosystem. When I return home (an hour and a half drive away), I crave coming back to my little alcove in the world, where everything is structured perfectly and the real world seems very far away. Not to say I don’t miss the people that make my hometown home to begin with, but school gives me a sense of adultness that sleeping in my childhood bedroom and waking up at 2 p.m. shockingly does not.
The people make the place
Right off the rip, coming home is the most appealing because of the people you come home to. For me, that’s of course my amazing and wonderful family (mostly my parents, love you though, Hunt), but also my incredible friends, who made leaving this town the hardest part for me. I shared so much with them and leaving them to go away to my little oasis will always be the toughest aspect of going to different schools. Although it’s important to have separate and new experiences, I believe them to be platonic soulmates. It’s funny because today, as I drove down the same road I’ve driven my beat-up red Subaru Legacy down since I turned 16, I listened to Noah Kahan in a completely unironic way given that it’s fall, “She Calls Me Back,” and in his words, I didn’t think about the excitement of a past romantic partner calling me back, but of the way I feel when my friends from home respond to my facetimes when we’re hundreds of miles apart. I thought about how, when I see them, I’m reminded of how lucky I am to be surrounded by people who make leaving this place feel unbearable and returning the highlight of my year. Even if by the end of each break we’re utterly sick of each other because we’ve spent every waking moment at one another’s side, I secretly can’t wait until I get to be outside a coffee shop with them for what was supposed to be an hour get-together, but always inevitably turns into a half-day yapping session. Though this town in of itself has grown on me, it would be nothing without these people. To me they’re more than just home, they’re the best parts of my life.
begruding appreciation
While there is nothing inherently wrong with the place I call home, I feel like it’s a must, like every other typical teenager, to have an internalized longing to escape “home” the minute they graduate. When you’ve spent almost two decades in the same place, the drive to desire new experiences can be easily understood, ones particularly where not every face you immediately recognize and most likely went to preschool with. When you grow up somewhere (I say as if I am the sole person in this world to have grown up), I mean seriously never left the damn place, it starts to feel more like an enclosure. Really, I should be grateful for how unassuming and constant New Milford is, given the most exciting thing to have happened here in the last decade being the opening of the third Dunkin on Danbury Road, it should be a sign I live in a relatively safe area. And for that fact I am lucky. But being naive and anxious to experience more than just the grand reopening of Walmart, from the age of 15 until I finally graduated, I despised the fact that I knew every stop sign, every store, every quick turn, every nook and cranny of this place because it made my life feel so predictable and, well, boring. Coming to school, despite it being my state’s school, felt like the first time I ever got to experience life without the reminder of who I was before. I got to be a new version of myself in front of 33,000 new people, learn new buildings, and call a new place home for once. But even though this new environment had the same seasons and some of the same faces, a part of me, which I initially resented and then came to respect, missed the way the leaves turned from a rosy red to a burnt orange down by Garrick Farms, or the sound of the little kids playing at the playground next to Pettibone School or even seeing the crazy dancing man on the train tracks next to my pizza delivering job. All of these aspects of my life have been the optime of never changing, a thing I feared since the moment I realized there was a world outside of New Milford, yet now I’ve craved while I sitting in my dorm studying or simply rotting in my bed.
loving tribute
To conclude my brief, but hopefully slightly sentimental, note to my hometown, though I do not foresee myself residing here after college, I will always feel a deep connection to every part of the place I grew up in. Every break that I return here, I’ll understand how lucky I was to have been given the chance to not only meet some of the most important people in my life but have been given a place that raised me to miss its constants. Though you may sit in your hometown now ruminating on ways to escape, it’s important to remember that this place is only a fragment of time, and even though it’s good to experience life away, it’ll always be there waiting for you.