Bound on all sides

I grew up in a small community close to a cosmopolitan one. I left as fast as I could after high school, vowing never to return. I was convinced that I was a big-city girl, ill-suited to my community of origin, which lacked even the anonymity and privacy available in many exurban areas due to the fact that it was an island requiring one commute 4 miles each way to and from the mainland on a communal ferry.
Intent on becoming a writer who lives always in high-rise apartment buildings and keeps cats, I fled to Chicago. However, I quickly learned that my southside neighborhood, with a population as large as that of the cosmopolitan area near my island home, was an island too. Home to a well-known university, Hyde Park was a speck of racial and economic integration bordered on three sides by African American communities at varying levels of economic well-being and on the fourth by Lake Michigan. We students were instructed as to the boundaries of the community, less visible than the rocky coast that bordered my world as a child. "Never EVER go south of 60th street or north of 47th. Stay out of Washington Park," we were instructed in security training our second day on campus. The five minute walk to the pier and 20 minute ferry-ride I made to school from 6th grade on was replaced with a 20 minute walk to the bus stop and 20 minute bus ride to downtown Chicago. "Do not take the EL on the sout side," warned the police officer giving security instructions. "The EL is not safe, and what's worse, you will have to wait for the bus to Hyde Park on the doorsteps of the Robert Taylor Homes [now defunct notorious Chicago housing project]."
It is amazing how wrong one can be about oneself. In the eternity since I left home, I learned that I am a dog person. Although I love the city, I am smothered if I am far from some imposing bit of the natural world. The year I spent in Chicago without easy access to the lakefront and South Side's beautiful parks where I routinely saw rabbits, fox, beavers, and all manner of birds, was about the worst of my life thus far. More importantly, I am hopelessly tied to the island community I was so anxious to leave.I was living back home last year - although on the mainland instead of the island. There is a peculiar and unexpected "fit" that I experience there. The way people dress, the sound of the gulls overhead, the constant wind, the ships signaling their departure for foreign lands or maybe just the next port, the reserved distance with which people approach one another - all of these things leave me feeling that I am in a place where I make sense. Combine this with the fact that my daily life when I was there evoked such continuity with the past, the streets I walked, indeed the uneven bricks in the sidewalk, are the very same as those that I tripped over 20 years ago, hurrying to catch the 2:15 ferry home after my Saturday dance classes. How did I withstand the slightly off-kiler and lost feeling I had all those years in the Midwest, revering home but experiencing it only in my memories. How is that I have once again packed my things and returned to Wisconsin - the dead-still air and humidity, the discordant fast smiles on the faces of those whose snide comments come just as quickly when you turn your back, everything fried and cheese and pre-fab.
Being home was not all wonderful. Although I KNOW that place, it has largely forgotten me. On my trips to the island to rake leaves and mow the lawn, walk the dogs, stroll on the beach, and spend time at the family home, there were some faces I recognize but many that I didn't. Many that I recognized did not recognize me. Although it is more than a decade since I left for college, the lack of recognition is fairly recent. I chalk it up to my mother's absence. My mother was a cornerstone of the community. A waitress at the only sit-down diner on the island, she solicited donations for the church fair and community Christmas party, ran Wednesday night Beano, worked seasonally at the greenhouse, cared for several elderly women, and provided baked goods for all community coffees and bakesales. They ran an extra ferry to the mainland so people could attend my mother's funeral. The chapel at Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was so full of islanders that many stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the back. With my mother's passing, the collective community memory of my siblings and I withered just as our tie to the day-to-day life of the place was cut. There is no one to talk about what we are up to, when we will next be home. It was my mother who kept us alive in that place.
At the democratic caucus, I was introduced to a long-time islander, Obie. I said, "Oh, we know each other." And Obie looked at me in surprise. He did not know who I was. I said, already swallowing tears, "I'm from the island, Clem and Loretta's daughter." I could have gone on but I didn't: "I babysat for your children Patrick and Suyun many times. You live on Winding Way. Your house is untidy and you have cats. I performed with you and your wife Annie 3 times in the summer talent show. You and Annie met at college - waiting for the bus. One time, probably in about 1992, you brought your children downfront for ice cream. The new employee I was training made one cone much larger than the other. You were angry that I did not allow her to add more ice cream to the smaller cone." Obie conceded the connection but there was never recognition in his eyes. I began to wonder that my attachment to my island home borders on fanaticism. Why do I have such memories while the people that are so alive in my mind fail to remember that I am?