sinking and swimming on long island

a little about my lifetime home

[a reader last week suggested that i write about long island, so here we go]

I have moved five times in my life without ever leaving my hometown. I went from an apartment in my cousin’s house, to an apartment in my grandmother’s house, to a house we owned with my sister, back to grandma’s apartment, and then finally I moved upstairs when we bough grandma’s house. I will die in this house. I am here - on Long Island - forever.

That’s not a bad thing. I may say it with resignation, with a sigh, but living on Long Island for my whole life has given me the right to feel blasé about it sometimes. It’s not where I would have chosen to be born, to live, had I been given any say in it as a child. Sometimes it’s not where I want to be as an adult. But it’s always home.

I often think about living in other places. How incredible would it be to stand in my backyard with my coffee in the morning and look at the sun rising over mountains? How lovely would it be to be able to head out my door and have within walking distance a choice of restaurants, stores, bars? What if my nearest neighbor was a mile away, or what if I could walk to the beach? Those initial daydreams stretch into prolonged fantasies, and when I am shaken out of my reverie, I am here, on Long Island, in my own house that I love and will never leave, despite those daydreams.

I have friends and family members who talk about leaving or who have left. My own daughter moved to California. I know Long Islanders who have migrated to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, other states where the taxes aren’t so high and the traffic isn’t so bad. They report back that they’re happy, they’re thriving, and while I’m happy for them, I wonder if they ever miss Long Island and everything it has to offer.

Growing up here was sort of idyllic. Like children in most American suburbs at the time, we spent a good portion of our day outside. We played kickball in the street. We walked to the corner stationery store to buy comics. We went to the school playground where dozens of other kids were let loose on Saturdays and lit off firecrackers and wreaked childlike havoc on the neighborhood. It was a pleasant childhood, but as a kid my belief was that it was the same anywhere, that all kids were having the same experience as me at the same time. There was nothing unique about Long Island to me as a child, except that I lived there.

And for the most part, Long Island is not a unique place. It’s like any other suburb in America where you have to have a car, where you drive everywhere, where there’s sprawl, and strip malls with closed stores, and traffic, and fast food places every 500 feet. The only thing that makes it different for me, is that I live here. Long Island is mine.

People make fun of my home a lot. They say we have funny accents (ok, we do), that this island is full of rich people (it’s not), that it consists of nothing but bagel shops and pizza joints (hey there are fortune tellers and cash for gold places too). Lately Long Island is known as a Trump stronghold, which doesn’t speak well about it. I’m not here to defend these things. No matter where you live, there are going to be negative things about it. No city or town or suburb is perfect. But it is perfectly fine.

Oh sure, I could tell you about the glorious beaches and the hiking trails. I could tell you about Montauk Point and the planting gardens and arboretums and museums scattered throughout the island, about the parks and restaurants and wineries and farm stands and fishing. But none of that matters to me. I’m not looking at it from a tourist point of view or an outsider’s view. I’m looking at it as someone who has lived here for 62 years, who made a life and had a family and settled down in a house that’s been in her family for over 70 years. I’m looking at it as someone who was raised here, and has all their memories tied up in the streets and avenues of Long Island.

I love so many things about this my home in tangible ways, but I also love it in esoteric ways that only a person with lifelong ties to a specific place can understand. My family, for the most part, is here. My parents live across the street from me. My one sister lives minutes from my house. I have aunts and uncles and cousins here. I have ties here. I am pitched like a tent to the ground of my ancestral home, pegs driven into dirt, set up in my space. There are ghosts that hover around me, ghosts of grandparents, ghosts of my youth, and they hold me here because I’m afraid if I left I’d lose my connection with them. I love how comfortable I am, how I feel like I fit in here, how the roadways seem to curve to meet me, like they exist just for me sometimes. I love how it seems suburban and urban at the same time, that you can go from sprawling mansions to industrial areas in a matter of seconds. I love how the homes are all different around here, that I don’t live in a homogenous neighborhood where all the houses look alike. Sure, the McMansions keep popping up around here, but for the most part, this is a very modest place. Maybe some of the stores have closed, and the roads need new paving, and the taxes are too high, but the amount of things I love about Long Island don’t nearly add up to leaving it.

The thing is, it’s all I know. I’ve traveled, I’ve seen other parts of the country and the world, but Long Island is all I know about living. It’s all I was ever given, and when I was old enough to change things, to go out and find somewhere else to live, I didn’t want to. I feel comfort here, and I am most certainly a creature of comfort. I need the cocoon Long Island affords me. I am not the kind of person who goes out into the world alone to make their way. I do not have the adventure gene that my daughter does. What I have is love; love for a place, love for a feeling, love for my home. As much as I complain about the traffic and the conservatives and taxes, this place provides me with a soft landing, and I am person who very much needs that. It also provides me with family and friends, and bagels and pizza. Who could ask for more.