On Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, there is a classic subzero Midwestern wind chill, and my husband Tim and I zip our rental car through the famously congested downtown Chicago ‘loop’ in an early morning hour. After a couple dozen minutes, the compact 1940s and 50s houses that stretch from either side of I-90 give way to the industrial columns of Gary. Some are smoking and some are not; the Falstaff logo is still faintly visible on the side of one abandoned facility, or perhaps I’ve made that up. A logo is not quite visible and I feel sure it’s the Falstaff brewery. I chase away the thought that I’ve made up a Falstaff brewery in Gary altogether.

I think of what my father always said about Gary, the architecture, the stunning physical city behind all the ruin, and about my great uncle who lived here and who used to take my grandfather to the dunes and beaches with girls. I also think of how my mother used to navigate away from the elevated ‘Skyway’ section of I-90 through Gary if she were driving alone from Indianapolis, where we lived, to her parents and siblings in Chicago, even though this meant an extra 20 or 30 miles; it was dangerous, she told me. “If you break down,”—she would intone.

Then finally, I-65 and Merrillville arrive, the Chicago/Gary cityscape ends, and I am, as the song goes, “Back Home Again in Indiana.” The corn and bean fields south of Merrillville are the dull, stilled November grey I remember, with huge mobile irrigation lines rainbowing across them, idle for the winter. The shallow Tippecanoe and White Rivers are frozen already, muddy-looking as ever, and there’s a Stuckey’s building that has still not been torn down nor repurposed, and I can’t remember how many years ago I saw it open. Then another Stuckey’s, this one an “adult superstore.” My father used to do whatever he could not to stop for a bathroom break at Stuckey’s because his children would wander among the aisles of candy and it would take longer than a rest stop or a McDonalds. I marvel at the new Subaru-Isuzu plant south of Lafayette that seems to take up the space of four farms. It’s good for the economy, I know, but the spectacle of it, the vastness of the gleaming white building across an expanse of empty fields, like Emerald City, is odd.

All in all, however, I am warmed to know I-65 south mostly by heart, despite the fact that I now live in Rhode Island and haven’t done the drive between Indianapolis and Chicago in I-don’t-know-how-long. At times during the 3-hour trip, I close my eyes and it is sometime between 1980 and 1990 and there are more people in the car and we’re driving home. I see Dad, driving, exhausted by several days spent with in-laws, and his father, silent in the passenger seat, watching the world go by. Perhaps my sister is next to me in the backseat, and my mom and brother are driving another car since we have to drop Grandfather off in Greencastle before getting to Indianapolis. I imagine I am still full from overeating and I am thinking about school and Christmas break and swim practice.

When I open my eyes to my husband and a rental car, I have approximated this memory so clearly that I have one of those moments when it seems impossible to be 30 and married with childhood and everything about it so far behind me.

When we reach the beltway around Indianapolis, we take a different direction than I’m used to, because the house I grew up in has been sold, and we’re going to stay in a hotel while we’re in town for a friend’s wedding. Mom has recently moved to Rhode Island and though her move is all in all a good thing, I feel something like nauseous hunger, sadness, edginess, as Tim and I don’t go to Greenleaves Circle.

Whether cruel irony or simple irony, Indianapolis is more familiar to me on this visit than it has been since before I left for college, familiar from the ten weeks I was here a year and a half ago while my father was dying in the hospital. Driving back and forth to his bedside at all hours of the day and night, lounging at the club pool with my sister’s children, and running through ‘the old neighborhood,’ which was now filled with couples my age and their young children, I re-acquainted myself with what I still considered ‘home.’ I fell in love with 1920s and 30s neighborhoods through which I simply used to pass and with a new rails-to-trails bike and running path that stretched 20 some miles from downtown north to the suburbs; I took in the historic downtown revitalization about which I knew a little but never absorbed first hand; I read the weekly independent newspaper and found quiet coffee shops where I imagined spending long afternoons; I imagined getting to know friends with whom I’d lost touch, and making new ones. It all seemed possible. Except for the fact that I did not want to leave Rhode Island. And when my mom placed the Indianapolis house, where I spent the first 18 years of my life, on the market, I celebrated her move to Providence and let myself quietly avoid thinking of anyone else taking over our house.

It is only this, the first trip to Indianapolis when I don’t have my parents’ house to sleep in, to go to, even, that prompts the full-force struggle with nostalgia for Indiana and with my proud Midwestern identity. Friends offered us their guest rooms for the weekend but in the end I decided we should be guests at the old club/hotel downtown where my father lunched often, where my parents had a quick dinner before the symphony or theater or Colts games, where my sister’s rehearsal dinner for her wedding took place. I wanted, above all, to come and go as we wished in this city where I refused to be a mere visitor.

We check into the club with a few hours to spare and I page through the club directory. Massages, I discover, are a bargain, and my husband is reaching for his law books to do some studying. I call, schedule a massage immediately, and descend to the basement of the club, to the locker room, and undress then don a robe. I sit outside the massage room until an older black man comes in and calls my name. He instructs me to lay down on the table on my back and he holds the sheet up for me to slide in. There is a pause, and I realize he’s blind. The massage begins and we chat. He says he’s worked at the Columbia Club for 19 years and asks me where I’m from. I explain. He says “Hughes? Is your father James?” and I say yes and he says he knew him from around the club and that he was sorry to hear “James had passed.” And I know he means this because I saw how sad my father’s death made the dry cleaning clerks and the gas station owner and the secretaries at his law firm. With this man’s acquaintance of my father, I am placed, I am no longer a guest, and I am home. I tip him so much I might as well be getting a massage in New York.

The wedding is great fun and people are welcoming, happy to see me come from so far, an exile come home. I see some people I haven’t seen in twelve years and they look just the same, as I suppose I do. Apart from the husbands and partners and boyfriends who have stepped into the mix, the clock could’ve spun back twelve years. I am glad I have come.

The next morning, we awake lazily and I go to the cemetery alone. The wind chill has risen slightly out of nostril-sticking-together range so that I can sit for a while and not be cold. I have imagined staying for a half hour, just sitting and reading the paper if I am blocked from the wind. But after ten minutes, I am cold and I am ready to leave. What shocks me, right in the back of my throat as I pull away, is what shocked me when Mom first allowed herself to be persuaded to move east: he is alone here and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Burying him in soil other than Indiana’s would seem criminal, as would my mom staying or my moving back simply to be nearer to this grave. There’s no good solution. I could stay longer today, I tell myself as I watch his headstone vanish in the rearview, but I’ll still have to leave eventually. Besides, (and this, likely, is the real reason I leave) sitting at his headstone won’t make me feel any better because it won’t make him, alive, any closer. And I don’t believe that my sitting there will make him feel any better. Still, and still, I can’t believe he’s alone here.

By the time I get back downtown, the gaping blackness of death, the same awe I felt in the beginning, the same thing I feel when I dream of him and wake up to realize anew that he’s dead, has swallowed me up and mixed with nostalgia and guilt for this, my ‘home.’ So I am silent when Tim gets in the rental car for the drive back up to Chicago and to our flight to Providence. I begin to wonder, how am I going to stay ‘a Midwesterner?’ How much longer can I say, ‘I’m from Indiana,’ as if a student at college orientation? How will my children understand that they are from two distinctly places—Rhode Island and Indiana, even though they will only be from Rhode Island? Indiana is not exactly Vacationland (that would be Maine) and I can’t foresee us hauling children there once a year, which is what it would take, at least, for them to ‘know’ it. And where would we stay?

“We can come once a year,” Tim says after I try to explain what I’m feeling. “We can send the kids to basketball camp.” I half-snicker, half-laugh, because this is mostly funny, because I hate basketball. “Good one, hon.”

I decide that I should find a summer teaching position in Bloomington or Indianapolis. Tim reminds me that this would mean being away from him for four to six weeks every summer, and wasn’t part of the teaching rationale that I gave myself my summers to write? When I get back to Rhode Island, I search the web for jobs anyway. I find a children’s writing camp, which I participated in as a child myself. It’s a ten-day workshop and the children are admitted by selection. They aren’t looking for help, but I e-mail the program director and describe what I consider to be my touching reasons for applying. She doesn’t respond. I realize what a freak I must sound like and I don’t e-mail her again.

My sister tells me that she’s fine with her kids not knowing Indiana terribly well because the people and things that would make it significant for them – Dad and Grandfather and Nana and the Greenleaves Circle house – are all gone. I’m not fine with it, though I’ve yet to come up with a solution. I’ve never had plans to move back to the Midwest, nor do I exactly want to now. Though Tim and I may not spend the rest of our lives in Rhode Island, I would bet a fair sum of money that we’ll stay in the Northeast, which is more or less what I’ve always imagined for myself. Whether it was my early obsession with the Preppy Handbook and its diagrams of East Coast prep school girls with their “thick calves from too much field hockey”; or whether it was my eager following my older siblings’ pattern of matriculation to East Coast schools followed by Manhattan residency as if this was the only pattern to adulthood; somewhere along the way the idea of moving back to Indiana became stranger than the idea of settling in the East. If I’m being honest, in fact, I’ll admit that there’s nothing tangible I miss about Indiana, nothing tangible that I have ever missed about Indiana, besides my parents, who are no longer there. And I have become a Rhode Islander in the sense that it feels strange when I go to the middle of the country now, without a big body of water around.

The best I can figure out is that I miss home, that ephemeral place that makes childhood a thing, something tangible, something you can point to and say, yes, that, there. It’s the place where your parents are perfect and summers are long and mostly carefree. Longing for home is longing for a time past, when I was younger, when my father was alive, when I didn’t think my East Coast ambitions would eventually cover over my Hoosier roots.

So I am an exile, as Indiana is both the place I come from and the place I can’t return. Trying to pass my nostalgia, my sense of this place on to our kids is impossible, and yet, perhaps we will send our kids to IU basketball camp or swimming camp. We will get them DePauw t-shirts and tell them the history of their Irish ancestors in western Indiana and their Irish-German ancestors, on my mother’s side, in Illinois. I will identify myself as a writer “born and raised in Indiana” and I will quickly answer “no” when people ask, “Are you from here?” I will want the Indianapolis bookstores to welcome my books on their “local authors” table and it will take me a minute to realize that I may not qualify. From time to time, I will check out grants from the Indiana state arts council, sure that they must have something for people like me. Finally, on the tests and quizzes I give to my high school English students, the bonus points will frequently revolve around yes, the Midwest, and they’ll think I’m a little bit strange for this.

We’re making the Thanksgiving weekend drive from Chicago to Indianapolis again this year, this time so I can read from my just-published novel to what I’ll call my ‘hometown’ crowd. My mom and brother and sister-in-law are coming, too, which may well make the sense of visiting even stranger—we’ll all stay in a hotel together. Nevertheless, I can’t wait for the drive, for the cold, dull grey of the fields along 65 and the lights and ribbons and greenery of holiday downtown Indianapolis; I’m even anxious for the melodramatic wrenching I’ll feel when it comes time to leave, because it assures me that at heart, I’m still a Midwesterner.