Feeling Like a Tourist

Today we were taking a motorcycle trip through the flat land of central Florida, and I realized that I really feel like a tourist here.  I thought, I will always feel like a tourist here.  Florida will never be home to me, as it is to so many Floridians down here, because I am just too old to ever become a "native", and also, I'm a very Midwestern person. 

I got to thinking about feeling like a tourist, and I realized that I have felt like a tourist in the places where I lived for so much of my life.  When I was twelve, we moved to Phillips, where there were two kinds of people, Phillips people, and 'tourists'.  The Phillips people I knew always thought I was a tourist.  They say your hometown, the place you are from, is the place that you graduate from High School.  Well, for me that was Phillips.  Yet, I never really felt like a native, even when I lived there. 

Between High School and my marriage, I moved 14 times.  That counts a lot of moving from apartment to apartment.   I did really feel at home in St. Paul.  I would have to say that was the one place I totally felt was home.  I more-or-less belonged.  I worked and lived in the same town, St. Paul, and I knew people there.

When we moved to Ellsworth, I felt again like a 'tourist'.  I carpooled with people who actually called Bob and I  "rich people from the CITY".  To our faces! I never lost the feeling of being a visitor.  After I'd had a child in St. Francis school for 12 consecutive years, the principal still got my name wrong.  And there was only at most 75 or 100 kids in the school at any one time.   You can't be a native in Ellsworth unless you had a great grandpa or grandpa, at least, that was born there.   When the kids were gone, I decided that I loved our farm, and it was home to me, in spite of the community.  I'd lived there longer than anywhere else.

Now I am a tourist again, for real.  That is just fine.  At this moment, I'm happy to think of my home as still in Ellsworth, and my final resting place, still in St. Paul where my girls are buried.  I'm good with that.  I embrace the tourist gig in South Florida for the time being.