What is Home to You?
An exploration of Oconomowoc, WI through its people
In February of 2008, while my mushy 5-year-old brain was still forming, my family made the cross-country move from Dover, New Hampshire to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. It would be another few years before I would gain sentience and be able to experience my new hometown, but at this point I began to capture glimpses of life that only a 5 or 6 or 7-year-old could. Memories that stuck with my now slightly less mushy brain are the hill leading into our neighborhood, Everest-like in nature, the smell of Lac La Belle that always hung around City Beach, and the sound of frogs in our backyard croaking up a choir every night. As I grew up, I slowly acquired more and more memories to add to my collection, and I eventually formed my personal view of the town I had grown up in. I now have a concrete sense of my physical home, but what do other residents of my hometown call home? To find out, I interviewed 8 different Oconomowoc-ians on their own views of what “home” means to them.
My first interviewee, Zach, describes home as his “family and friends.” Due to his involvement in Irish dance, his musical studies at DePaul University, and his prior education at Arrowhead High School, Zach has friends in many different places. Irish dance itself feels like home to him as well. “The community that it brings really creates a home environment…everyone’s just dancing, they’re having fun. It’s good.” He would also like to shout out Ethan, a particularly close friend that has added to his overall sense of home.
To Rhonda, home means four simple things: “safety, love, my dog, and my husband.” She grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, which has the second-largest number of O’s in its town name just behind Oconomowoc. Having moved here in the late 80s, Oconomowoc isn’t Rhonda’s original home, but her four descriptors of home allow her to bring that feeling wherever she goes.
For Myah, home is “being comfortable,” even if that means being alone. Home is also being with her mom.
Mike is not originally from Oconomowoc, but he still carries a sense of home with him by defining it as “a place you’re at that you feel comfortable, you feel safe, you feel welcomed.” He adds onto that, however, by stating that home won’t necessarily feel like this “all the time.” Even though he didn’t grow up here, he loves the town, especially enjoying the green space in Oconomowoc’s town center.
Jenny sums up a feeling of “home” with a few core building blocks, saying, “You got your friends, you got your church, you got support.” Home, to Jenny, can be both physical and emotional, as she makes the distinction between the home at one’s foundation and the home in one’s surroundings. For Jenny, this can be both positive and negative, as it means home can change. “The younger ones are totally changing. There are a lot more of them doing drugs. The parents — nothing they did wrong. It took all the surrounding areas,” she states.
Jenny has had personal experiences with this, but strongly adds that “you still got your family and your friends to fall back on.” Although she says that home can always be changing, Jenny believes that “there’s something at the core that always stays the same.” Having grown up in small town Ohio, Jenny is no stranger to change coming to local communities. In regards to this, she simply says to “hang on” amidst tumultuous and uncontrollable change.
Luke says that “community and family” are why he’s here in Oconomowoc, and it’s what defines home for him. Home isn’t just limited to the people he knows personally, however, as he says that the general Lake Country community brings a home-like feeling for him as well.
Home, to Norah, can be summed up simply as “family.”
Syd, who describes herself as a “follower of Jesus,” describes home as “eternity with God” at the end of her life.
After interviewing all of the Oconomowoc residents that I did, I came to the unsurprising conclusion that “home” means different things to different people. What did surprise me, however, is how some of the responses didn’t paint “home” as an inherently positive thing. Take, for example, how Mike asserted that home won’t always feel comforting and welcoming, or how Jenny talked about the sometimes harmful impacts of one’s given home and surroundings. Although I do not in any way see my hometown as a utopia, the interviews I conducted forced me to ask myself, can one love their home in spite of its shortcomings? If home can be non-physical, can it exist in a hostile environment?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that home cannot be tied down to one description. Home can change, but it can stay the same. Home can be the people that follow you through your life’s journey, but those people may not always be around. Just like how I was unaware of the home I would grow up in while strapped into a carseat on my family’s trek from New Hampshire to Wisconsin in 2008, I am beautifully unaware of the many places and people I have yet to call home in my life.
