If you’ve spent some time with me, you could be forgiven for thinking that I don’t like where I grew up. I critique the US, heavily and often. When asked about Ohio, I joke that we’ve produced the most astronauts because people want to do everything they can to get as far away from it as possible. From a very young age, I felt a compulsion to leave my hometown, and I did - I moved away for college at eighteen and continued to make my home elsewhere thereafter. And yet.
I love Cincinnati. I love it, truly madly deeply. It’s hard to know where to start writing this. When the sun hits the Ohio river just right, it sparkles as though it were made of millions of diamonds. The sunsets are absolutely unrivaled, the nature beautiful. And I don’t care what out-of-towners say - our chili is the best. That’s the sales pitch, but the truth is that I love Cincinnati for the flipside of these things too. The river smells offensive and I once saw a body being pulled out of it. Sometimes the smog is so thick it’s recommended to stay inside, woods are being cut down to build new apartments on the daily, and driving here can feel like an extreme sport because of the potholes. But let me be clear that none of these statements are condemnations or take away from my love for it.
This is a real place. It is everything, and chock full of contradictions in the same way that real people are everything and chock full of contradictions. I’ve always loved real people, which is to say - I’ve always loved people who are honest about the fact that they’re messy. That they make mistakes, have problems, struggle. All of this makes them even more beautiful. It makes it easier to see myself in them. And that’s how I feel about my hometown.
There’s something so relieving about coming back here and realizing that I’m not an oddity here. I’m unique, and I belong. Cincinnati is kind of trashy and I love that because so am I. It’s kind of beautiful and I love that because so am I. When people here ask “where did you go to school?” they mean high school, not college, and I think that’s kind of charming and intimate. I’m fascinated by the way Cincinnatians relate to each other. The intricacies of neighborhood rivalries is its own study to be made. It’s so interesting here.
There’s a quote attributed to Mark Twain which says that Cincinnati is twenty years behind the rest of the world. He never actually said that, but I agree that there’s something to be said for the rhythm of this place. It is not slow, but it does feel untouched by the chaotic urgency of modernity that permeates a lot of bigger cities. It is a cultural hub with a multitude of museums, a ballet company, theater companies, multiple professional sports teams, phenomenal colleges, music venues that major artists perform in, and the list goes on, yet there’s a sense of minding its own business, and maybe that’s where the accusation of being behind the rest of the world comes from. Cincinnati is just doing its own thing. It keeps up, but somehow at its own pace. People here are living, they’re not performing a life for the rest of the world.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like an ode because I’m talking about bad smells and trashiness and slowness. If you think I’m saying anything negative, then you don’t understand the way I see the world. What I’m trying to say is that I (try to) love with clarity. I believe that naming the good and the bad is an important aspect of loving fully and groundedly. Now when people ask me about where I’m from, I beam because I love talking about it. I’m also going to keep critiquing Cincinnati, and the US more generally. It’s not that everything here is fine. I want to be honest about things that are problematic, and I want to be honest about the fact that there is a lot here that drives me crazy. There are serious issues. But I’ve lived in a lot of places by now, and what I’ve learned is that every place in the world has issues.
No place is untouched by hardship and ugliness and weirdly specific complaints about the unique struggles of living there. Another place is not better just because it’s another place. A lot of people in Cincinnati have told me they’re jealous that I live somewhere else, somewhere not in Ohio or the Midwest, and I was guilty for a long time of feeling a sense of relief that I did in fact get out of this part of the world. But I no longer see living elsewhere as something to be jealous of.
I love where I live now; I wouldn’t change it for the world. It is my home.
I love where I grew up; I wouldn’t change it for the world. It is also my home.
When I first started college in upstate New York, multiple people asked me if I was from the South because of my accent, which utterly bamboozled me. A lot of Swiss people think I’m British because of the accent I have when I speak German. And after having lived in Rochester and NYC and Switzerland, when I came back to Cincinnati two years ago, someone asked me where I was from because he couldn’t recognize my accent. This was a new experience, to feel so alien in the place I’m actually from.
I don’t know what kind of accent I have anymore when I speak English. I don’t know how to signal to people that I carry all of the places I have lived and do live with me, and that I cherish them all immensely. Nowadays I feel a little bit like a foreigner no matter where I am. But despite that, I will always claim Cincinnati, the city that raised me.
I love this so much. Helps me reconcile where I grew up in Western New York, which is more Midwestern than not... and I have also experienced the accent questions in every place I have lived!!!
You‘re my favorite cinnieminnie 🫶🏼