Post by laura on Jun 28, 2014 15:35:58 GMT -5
Anyone still on here? 
I grew up with my grandparents, who were the kind of couple city people just loved to visit: so 'authentic'! Such 'real' farmers! They were so itchy to look around our old farmhouse, and some would take pictures of the strangest things, I thought at the time: whatever was most rusty or rundown or covered in cobwebs.
When I was younger, I was nothing but embarrassed by my grandparents. I was going to move away and never come home and carve a big new life for myself.
When I went to school in the city, full of hopes and dreams and confidence, I soon realized that I had been a big fish in a small pond in the town I went to school in; in the city I had nothing to distinguish myself. Then I realized that my grandparents were cool to all those city folk! Suddenly all of the knowledge and traits that I'd acquired without thinking about it--against my will, actually--had social capital in the city. It pains me to think about it now, how after that, every time I went back home I had a brand new interest in everything. I came to love it all, and learn it and memorize it as best as I could: the different ways of talking and storytelling of the neighbors, and all of the old-fashioned skills...
I don't want to make it sound like I was deliberately appreciating my grandparents like I hadn't before, just because they were 'cool'; this is all in retrospect. At the time it just kind of happened..
Not appreciating home until you leave it is nothing new. But that the new appreciation I had of my grandparents was so colored by the shallow fact that it helped me be 'cool' tainted the whole thing for me, later. Now I'm kind of nostalgic for that confident 18-year-old who was strong enough to not need any history... It's like people who are endlessly into genealogy; it's like, make your own history...
Anybody relate?
I grew up with my grandparents, who were the kind of couple city people just loved to visit: so 'authentic'! Such 'real' farmers! They were so itchy to look around our old farmhouse, and some would take pictures of the strangest things, I thought at the time: whatever was most rusty or rundown or covered in cobwebs.
When I was younger, I was nothing but embarrassed by my grandparents. I was going to move away and never come home and carve a big new life for myself.
When I went to school in the city, full of hopes and dreams and confidence, I soon realized that I had been a big fish in a small pond in the town I went to school in; in the city I had nothing to distinguish myself. Then I realized that my grandparents were cool to all those city folk! Suddenly all of the knowledge and traits that I'd acquired without thinking about it--against my will, actually--had social capital in the city. It pains me to think about it now, how after that, every time I went back home I had a brand new interest in everything. I came to love it all, and learn it and memorize it as best as I could: the different ways of talking and storytelling of the neighbors, and all of the old-fashioned skills...
I don't want to make it sound like I was deliberately appreciating my grandparents like I hadn't before, just because they were 'cool'; this is all in retrospect. At the time it just kind of happened..
Not appreciating home until you leave it is nothing new. But that the new appreciation I had of my grandparents was so colored by the shallow fact that it helped me be 'cool' tainted the whole thing for me, later. Now I'm kind of nostalgic for that confident 18-year-old who was strong enough to not need any history... It's like people who are endlessly into genealogy; it's like, make your own history...
Anybody relate?