I grew up alienated from my hometown in South-West Washington State, and wanting to get out as soon as I could. Looking back, the alienation and dislike were probably exaggerated and amplified by romantic ideas about the rest of the world, but maybe not. When I go back to visit, it doesn’t really feel like a homecoming. The big fir trees where I played as a kid were cut down when they widened the road; my childhood home was first burned in a drug-related arson fire, then razed to build a mall.

It’s not uncommon. In the course of some genealogical research I found out that the Chicago neighborhood where my father grew up 70 years ago is now under the tarmac of O’Hare airport.

Walking down the street in the town near where I live last weekend, sun shining on my face, I realized this small Austrian town was as much my hometown as anyplace else. I first arrived here when I was 17, touring Europe with a group of high school students on the “People to People” program (a man speaking at our orientation prior to the trip told us a story about meeting a local girl in some European country and marrying her, which seemed impossibly exotic to me then…). I came back to visit when I was 21, fell in love and stayed a year. Lived here off and on since then, and moved here for good almost 13 years ago.

I’ll be 44 soon. I first came here almost 27 years ago. So although I haven’t lived here solid the whole time, I have had a certain affiliation with this place for longer than anywhere else I’ve known. The first girl I ever kissed lives down the street. The first place I ever got drunk is still serving drinks to school kids.

The Danube continues to flow through town, although they’ve raised the banks for flood control and built a nice park. I swam across the river at 17, now I go rowing there with my daughter, who meets her boyfriend for walks at a fountain standing on the corner where I almost got in a fight with a bunch of rowdies 22 years ago.

We live in a house we spent 10 years building. The apple tree we planted in the back yard finally started bearing fruit last year.

Although I’ll always feel like an outsider in some respects (and I enjoy the status), I am better integrated here than I ever have been anywhere else. I’m on the parents’ association at the local music school, where my kids and I take lessons. The local mayor knows my wife and me, we know all the doctors at the hospital, the cashiers at the store let my kids run a tab. I can go to the back door at the local post office to pick up packages before official opening hours on my way to work and they’ll serve me. My daughter goes to the same school my wife attended, and even has some of the same teachers.

It’s the only place where history layers up like that for me; where memories add up. Everywhere else, there’s that break, the discontinuity, the moving away.