The above image, which just happens to be among my very favorite, was captured when I was in the fifth grade or so--some 15 years ago as I write--and it pictures me (far right) with two of my favorite people. Jake (left) is my younger brother and Brandon (center in the Green Bay Packers shirt, Go Pack) is my best friend dating back to our days at North Hudson Elementary. When looking at this photo, though, I'd say the strongest feeling I get is a sense of home. It was taken at my grandparents duplex apartment in North Hudson, WI, a very small town in west-central Wisconsin. This is just one of the many, many buildings I've called home, but it's the only of those places that I now think of when I consider the term "home."
That apartment was not where my grandparents lived when I was born (not that I'd have remembered) and they lived in several other places before passing away as residents of nursing homes, but it was the place they lived the longest while I knew them. In addition, I stayed there with them, periodically at first and then more and more consistently as I grew older, splitting time living with them and my parents who, for all their moving, only twice for very brief periods left the greater area of Hudson, WI, where I managed to attend all but a single semester of my K-12 education. Because my parents rarely lived in the same rented house, apartment, or trailer home for more than a year growing up, this apartment on Eighth Street serves as a primary centering point for my childhood memories.
Growing up, our family was perpetually on shaky financial grounds. My parents each bounced between low-paying jobs, and the combination of shitty wages, bad spending (exacerbated by my mother's gambling), and two kids strained my parents well beyond their means at all times. For this reason, we were forced to relocate constantly on a seemingly endless cycle of not being able to afford our rent, finding something cheaper (or staying with the grandparents until we could afford something cheaper), making some very minimal progress to "get ahead" and relocating to a nicer place, only to once again fall behind, failing to pay the rent and having to go back to something cheaper yet again.
It happened for slightly different reasons each time. Sometimes my dad would lose a job, other times my mom would quit hers, and sometimes it was just shitty luck (wrong bill, wrong time, etc.), but it was always something. In all, working on a few occasions with my mom and brother to try and remember all the places I've lived in western Wisconsin, I've come up with around 25 apartments, duplexes, triplexes, condos, trailer homes, and houses, and I am currently working on mapping each one. Sometimes we lived in the same apartment complex but a different unit, other times in the same trailer park but in a different trailer, etc. and I counted these separately, but that's still considerably more than average. (The average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime). By the time I was 15, I felt like I'd hauled more shit in my life than most professional movers.
Since living with my parents in Wisconsin as a child, of course, I've also lived in a few other places. While attending the University of Minnesota and after, for a total of five years, I lived in Minneapolis. For each of those years I lived in a different place. Freshman year I lived in a dorm, Sophomore year I lived in a nice, too-expensive apartment near campus, Junior year I lived in a cheaper apartment not far from there, and the year I eventually left school without graduating despite wasting a shit-ton of money I lived in a house a short distance from campus. The year after that, at first unemployed and eventually accepting a banking job at Wells Fargo*, I lived in an apartment not far from the previous year's house.
Accepting that working at Wells Fargo was never going to work for me, I resigned myself to returning to an industry I'd worked in the previous two summers--roofing sales. I called in sick to WF knowing it would result in termination because of a growing pile of call-ins, latenesses, and customer and coworker complaints of smelling like alcohol from the late nights of drinking to forget I'd become a banker. I walked in knowing I was getting fired and got a chance to tell the branch manager, "This is the easiest firing you'll ever have in your whole life. I could not be more excited at the prospect of not working here any more." We proceeded to bullshit about my future plans, as well as sports and chicks, for over twenty minutes.
I didn't care because I'd hopped on board as a salesman for a roofing company called CMR Construction. Not even the franchise owner knew what the CMR stood for, by the way. "Make something up if a customer asks," he said. That should tell you what you need to know about that industry. This job was in Midland, TX and it took me all of 22 days to realize how much that place sucked. My roommates--roof salesman as well--and I bailed on west Texas for the monumentally better Denver, CO because we'd heard a massive hailstorm had created a lot of work in the area for ICs like ourselves. Without a specific promise of a job, but knowing the industry was such that anyone with experience could get hired by any company, once we'd made up our minds we couldn't even wait until morning to bail on the tumbleweeds and pump jacks for mountain views and architecture.
While living in Denver I flew home for my birthday and wound up having surgery to remove my gall bladder, which had become infected and threatened to burst. I missed my return flight because of the surgery and ensuing recovery, and shortly after I left the hospital I was fortunate enough to become infected with H1N1 flu, which, as everyone remembers, is a particularly shitty kind of flu to get. Anyway, this happened in October and I didn't make it back to the Denver area until late February. Then, on April 1st, a hailstorm hit Chicago. I lived there, working the storm for yet another roofing company, from April 3rd through August of 2010 before leaving that company and the roofing industry behind yet again.
At that point I lived with my parents in Wisconsin again for a few months before securing my present job here in California through my brother and moving out here in February of last year. Thus far I love it in SoCal, but I'm not yet at the point of seeing myself in any one place forever. For all of the stress it caused me growing up, and the embarrassment of the many, "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you we moved... again," conversations with friends, I've come to appreciate my unusual circumstance for its novelty and as a source of additional perspective. I somewhat like being able to say, at 26, that I've lived in approximately 40 dwellings in more than ten cities and six states. Beyond that, I like knowing that I'll certainly be adding to those numbers in my lifetime.
I feel incredibly lucky to have had that duplex apartment on Eighth Street in North Hudson, Wisconsin as a consistent place to bring my friends and to get together with family. I hope I never forget playing in the now-developed forest that once stood behind that apartment or the once-open adjacent lot that is now a road and row of houses. I use these images and memories to ground me and to know that, no matter where I am, where I live or where I'm going next, I already have a home.
~Jeff N.
*The job that caused me to start smoking weed everyday because they always yelled at me for smelling like booze from my previous night's drinking. How else was I going to get myself through working for such a soulless fucking entity? Certainly not without being fucked up on something.
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