The question has lurked in my head for months now, springing up at the most unexpected times. 

“What’s it like living in the place where you grew up?”

The friend who posed it earlier this spring spent her childhood on the move, bouncing from state to state and town to town. Both nerdy kids who grew up to be equally nerdy adults, we’ve found a number of similarities in the way we each grew up, but the “where” of our beginnings is markedly different. Where she was always moving, I spent my formative years caught in the same place where I later decided to settle down: western Sullivan County. 

I've been thinking about her question since she asked, thinking about the miles long list of subtle ways it shapes my every day.

Something that's bubbled to the surface is how hard it is to escape loss in the place where you grew up. Metaphorical ghosts haunt us everywhere we turn.

Grabbing a few bags of topsoil from Agway means driving past the place where a beloved childhood friend died.

Running into Peck's for milk means running into someone who wants to share a memory of my grandfather.

Getting my blood drawn at Grover Hermann means sitting in the lobby beneath a donation board listing out the names of my grandparents and great grandparents.

Clearly those of us who live in the towns where we grew up are far from alone in feeling the impact of loss. You can live clear across the globe from your childhood home and still regularly encounter reminders of the people you've loved who are no longer with us, not least because the people who you love most are often the people who made this new place feel like home.

Nor does this quirk of location make the pain of one loss somehow greater than the pain of another. 

It’s not more than, but it is different. 

Choosing to live in the place where you were raised means facing a lifetime of loss everywhere you look. Sometimes that can make it hard to breathe.

And then sometimes you need topsoil, and as you tap the gas to climb the hill to Agway, a funny thing your childhood friend used to say pops into your head.

Right there, all alone in the driver's seat of your car, with the afternoon sun streaming through the windshield, you find yourself giggling.

Because they're gone, but they're not lost.

Their memories are all around you in the place you call home.