The Geography of Cousins

These thoughts occurred to me a few weeks after arriving in Arizona:

Almost all of my cousins (and there are more than 30, including in-laws) live in New Jersey. Well, almost all of my family (including aunts, uncles, grandparents and my immediate family, that puts the count well over 60) lives in New Jersey. And until very recently, I'd lived there for all but college (four wonderful years in Virginia!).

I always liked New Jersey, but something about being teased about my "homeland" in college, and then returning back to NJ into a graduate program in which hardly anyone else was from NJ, made me really defensive about my love of my home. I think the actor Zach Braff said it well, "I think when you come from a place that's made fun of your whole life... and you love it, you get defensive, and you want to sing its praises to people. I love New Jersey. I think it's made me who I am."

So back to my cousins-- there are very few who live outside of New Jersey: the Virginia cousins, the Kentucky cousin and her family, and I have another Virginia cousin and her family who I haven't seen in a long time, and a cousin in Tennessee with his family who I haven't seen in even longer, and a couple of cousins right over the border into Pennsylvania. But yeah, a lot of family in New Jersey.

Thanks to the marvelous internet and my lot of free time, I've been able to talk to some of my cousins (and a lot of other wonderful people in a lot of places!) more lately. But I think about that, and I think about how I label them by where they are in my head, and wonder, wait a second... am I the Arizona cousin?

Good grief, that can't be right. No. Can't be. I've been here a month now, but it's not like I've got an Arizona license, or changed my address or anything. And goodness knows I've got proof I'm from New Jersey.

 

Or I like this one better that my older brother edited:

(Hey, I'm not the only one whose love of New Jersey is... strong.)

I'm probably not the Arizona cousin, because it hasn't been that long and it isn't forever. Also, I'm the cousin who routinely gets asked where I'm off to next, so I'm not even sure I'm the/a New Jersey cousin so much as the nomadic relative that no one can particularly keep track of.

I guess what I realized through this stream of consciousness is, my sense of place is out of whack these days. "Sense of place" is one of those squishy geography things that I was terrified to teach in Human Geography last fall, but turned out to be one of the best conversations we had in class all semester. The term "place" implies some sort of charisma or meaning or uniqueness to it, giving it a more particular definition than the more vague "space" or the only spatially specific "location". (See, I learned things too when I taught.) On the other hand is "placelessness" which is what happens when the uniqueness of a place is replaced with repetitive, uninteresting, indistinguishable scenery, thus losing its meaning.

So my out of whack sense of place is coming from feeling this great love for and connection with New Jersey, and not being there, and not feeling such a personal attachment to Arizona, but being here. I mean, Arizona has been a pretty cool adventure so far (NRCS outings, London Bridge, tree rocks, red rocks, volcanic rocks, burros, new environments to explore and ask questions about in general). But it's not home, and knowing that it's only temporary is really going to prevent me from getting used to it and feeling any sort of settled here.

And I can't think of it as more than temporary because both Mike and I prefer the east coast. We like our families. We like our friends. We like the ocean and the forests. But in the meantime, here we are. I like to think that I'll figure out what's next for me soon, and then we can figure out what to do as a team.


And in the meantime, I'm pretty sure I'm not the Arizona cousin, but rather the cousin who is in Arizona... for now. But there are a lot of really exciting possibilities for the future, and I probably don't even know half of them. And that's kind of exciting in and of itself, but that unknown is also kind of affecting my personal sense of place. I guess that's not an entirely bad thing though. It's kind of become its own adventure, figuring out what my adventure is going to be...