Sweet Home Chicago

photo by Michael Anderson

In spite of all my planning, we found ourselves “houseless” for two weeks between rentals at the beginning of July. Given that we’d have to stay in hotels anyway, we decided to take a trip back to the Midwest to visit our parents for the first time in years. I hadn’t been there since 2017 when we took the kids on a cross country tour to celebrate the eldest’s high school graduation. Four years and a bachelor’s degree in physics later, after moving our stuff into storage all over Santa Cruz County, we packed up the car and once again headed east, stopping first in Nebraska to visit Walt’s family and then on to the Chicago area where we would stay in my childhood home.

This was the first time we’d seen our parents since the fires. Due to covid, we’d had to wait until vaccines rolled out to visit them. I don’t know if it was the stress of the pandemic, or time itself, but each of them had changed in ways I can’t quite explain. It felt as if I’d slipped into the Fey for a few moments while they moved into a different phase of life. I wasn’t prepared for the changes Father Time had bestowed on each of them and while I know we too have aged these past few years, it felt different, like when the boys were little and each month they morphed into a new being—newborn to toddler to preschooler to first grader—shifting from one phase to another. It appears that’s what happens in the final decades of our lives as well, and for some reason I feel afraid, as if I’m missing out on something important while living so far away. If two years could change them this much, how will it be in six months? Suddenly, bi-annual visits don’t seem enough anymore. I long for more time with them than I’ve had this past fourteen years.

Yet their hugs were familiar, as was the lush, green land they still call home. Walt’s family owns a farm in Nebraska, the heart of which is Lake Lemay, named after his mother. Three days of floating in the lake with my sister-in-law, relishing in the relief of well-watered lands after driving through the deserts of the ever drying West, was deeply nourishing. Fishing at sunset, like we did all those years before moving to California, brought back feelings of nostalgia I’d long ago buried. My heart swung between the joy of being near them and this place again and a melancholy I couldn’t yet explain. Something hurt in my heart, a nameless pain, which grew as we arrived at my parent’s.

They also live on a lake, called Mud Lake by those of us who grew up on it and Lake Napasuwe by the man who once owned most of the land around the lake—a fake indigenous sounding word he’d created by taking the first two letters of each of his children’s names and mashing them together. My father built this house in Wauconda when I was seven and most of my memories are of this place. A home not only to myself, but also beavers, muskrats, fish, dragonflies, blue heron, swans, sandhill cranes, and other birds that stop to rest there on their way somewhere else. Growing up in Wauconda, the grass was soft under my feet in the summer, the cattails rustled in the springtime wind, the trees turned golden, red, and brown while apples ripened in the autumn, and in the winter the lake became our very own ice skating rink. Being “home” when I’ve lost my “home” to fire was unsettling, like those dreams where you’re late to a test but can’t seem to find the right room, and the pain in my heart grew ever so slightly.

My parents took me and my family on a sweet boat ride along the bigger lake in town, Bangs Lake, allowing me the gift of traveling down memory lane. The beach where we kids spent our summers playing king of the raft while trying not to look stupid in front of our crushes. The other beach where I worked in the concession stand for a summer. The restaurant where I worked as a salad girl in 8th grade on Sundays for pocket money, often getting to play hostess for an hour or so while the real hostess spent some quality time with the owner in his “office.” The famous J-slide at Phil’s Beach where they filmed the Blues Brothers. The stories of my life in Wauconda scattered about the shoreline like dreams from a long ago time. These both delighted me but also made the ache inside of me begin to radiate deeper into my heart. When we began the boat tour, the guide asked us where we were from. I wasn’t sure how to answer.

Where am I from? Wauconda? Santa Cruz? The Big Trees?

We had a wonderful time with both sets of parents, but it was the visit to Chicago itself where something else awoke inside of me—not pain, but the awe of returning to the one place I have always felt whole. It may seem strange that a woman so in love with her land, so connected to the magic and path of the green witch, would come alive in a city, but whenever I emerge from the Blue Line under Washington street and glance up at the buildings—modern monuments not unlike the pyramids of Egypt—I sense myself pulsing with awareness in all directions. From the moment my mother first put me on the train in Barrington to visit Santa Claus at Marshall Fields on State Street, I fell in love with the Windy City by the great lake called Michigan. After eating and driving around Oak Park, we took the L into Chicago to meet up with two of my best college friends, Michelle and Betsy, and their husbands for dinner. My sons were left to their own devices and while neither was that familiar with Chicago, my younger son has been living in Philly for almost two years and he had no problem navigating a night out on the town with his brother while I enjoyed a fabulous meal near Millennium Park with lifelong friends.

As my younger son mentioned the next day, there’s a reason Frank Llyod Wright famously said, “Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.” Built in the age of the skyscraper and the World’s Fair—the Westinghouse Corporation won the bid for illuminating the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, the first all-electric fair in history—the architecture defines the mood which defines the people. As we walked from my friend’s apartment to dinner, I couldn’t help glancing up in wonder at the nighttime beauty of this place. It makes sense that electricity made its debut in this city by the great lake.

We would finish the trip on a high note, but for some reason the ache in my heart continued to grow as we drove across Colorado, then Vegas, and eventually back to California, moving into our beach house just before dinner. During this final stretch of driving, I often found myself longing to get home to my bed, the hot tub, my trees…only to remember that I no longer had those things. Part of traveling is the delight of returning home, but what to do when you don’t even know what that home will be like when you arrive? It’s strange to travel when you have no home to return to. We’d signed a lease without seeing the inside and were relieved to find it so homey. The five minute walk to the beach and dinner at the Mexican restaurant with a view soothed me a bit. Yet still, this pain continued, pulsing around my heart and into my throat, causing my eyes to sting.

It would take several days for me to understand it—I was homesick, not for the home I lost in the fire, but for Chicago and the life I’d lived there. I’ve lived in California fourteen years and have fallen in love with this place and the friends I’ve made, yet I’d stuffed the loss of Chicago somewhere deep within me, essentially ignoring the fact that I missed the land of my childhood, the city of my soul, the people, family, and friends of the Midwest. After sitting with this realization for a few moments while sipping my coffee beside the ocean, the village still sleepy and quiet in the gray foggy morning, it dawned on me that I’m in love with both places—Northern California and Chicago—two vastly different beings, but both needed for me to feel complete.

It’s not unlike being in love with two men, no matter where I am in the world, I’m always missing one of them. Perhaps the fire is an invitation to indulge in both; to create a sanctuary here on the land that taught me how to open to the mysteries of the universe AND own a condo in Chicago, a dream I’ve had since I was a little girl enjoying our annual day-after-Thanksgiving dinner at the Berghoff on Adams Street.

What if life isn’t either/or but both/and?

Alas, how does that song go?

Come on, oh baby, don't you wanna go?

Come on, oh baby, don't you wanna go

Back to that same old place

Sweet home Chicago