Rootedness in a homeland

One of the places we visited during our travels was Dundee, Michigan, near where my cousin and her family live on a farm. For the past three years it has been home to a huge new Cabela's store, which is changing the flavour of the little community.

My uncle is a farmer who has lived on this land all of his life. As he was showing us his antique tractors, we stood outside his barn. He pointed to a small white building to the southeast and told us that he was born in that house. The house where my cousin grew up, and where we used to visit them in the 1950s and '60s, was about half a mile to the north of their present home.

What would it be like to be born, grow up, live and die on the same land? It's difficult for me to fathom. My education and employment have condemned me, and those like me, to living far from the land of our birth. Yet there is something to be said for being so strongly rooted in a local community. For me it may amount to little more than nostalgia for a vanished way of life that I was never part of. But for my uncle it is real life. And my cousin and her family are part of this again after living elsewhere for a number of years. I admit to envying them to no small extent.