Other side of the country.

I live about an hour from my spawn point. I don’t consider it home as I left it 15 years ago after realizing it was dead end city full of terrible people.

I’m about 500 meters from the place where the hospital I was born stood (the building still exists, but it’s something else now).

I grew up in this city since my parents moved here before I was born. I also lived here half of my adult life and I’m thinking of leaving.

I have no emotional connection with this city. My family is from a different region of the country and we have a very different culture. My heart is with my parents hometown and I always identify myself with the region autonym.

Maybe 250 miles. While I have “rose colored glasses” about that being a wonderful place to grow up, now it’s all grey monochrome dystopia. The major tech employer left and the town never recovered. Many years later it’s exactly the same, but decayed.

At this point I’ve lived in my current town almost as long, my current region longer. It’s home

Weirdly I’m only 17 kms as I’m staying with friends while I’m away from home working. I actually live 90 kms away now, though I lived all over the world growing up. The furthest away was 12k kms.

480km away. Not much

And no

About 14k km away. Born in Mexico. Reside in Taiwan for now(work).

4300km. I’ll go back for a few more funerals and maybe because downtown Boston has fantastic food.

191 km, or 9-11 hours’ travel. #BCFerries

I do not consider it home. I left when I was 6, and have only enough memories to find my old house on a map and mayyybe point out the nun-run kindergarten we had to attend because no one else would take us so young.

I’m at home in a town about 10-15 miles from the town and hospital I was born in (as the crow flies.)

And I’ve lived the majority of my life in a town that’s probably about another 3 miles from there.

If I were asked to name my home town, I wouldn’t give the name of the town with the hospital, I’d give the town I grew up in.

But it’s all close enough together that all three towns share a certain sense of hominess for me, I have childhood memories from all 3 towns.

We all speak, more-or-less, the same local dialect with the same slang (there’s a couple shibboleths and bits of local lore that are unique to one part of the county over another) We enjoy the same local foods, root for the same sports teams, attend a lot of the same big local events, etc.

I proudly, and without a hint of irony, tell people that my ancestry is from that town I grew up in.

Yes, if you go back 3+ generations, you’ll find that all of my ancestors came from various European countries. Little bits of that has trickled down to the current generation, like a certain fondness for pierogi and kielbasa from my Polish side.

But that’s also part of my local culture, those are fairly common food items here too.

I don’t speak any of the languages my ancestors spoke, I’ve never set foot in those countries. Even my family name hasn’t really carried over, my great great grandfather changed the name after having already lived here for some time under the original Italian name. It’s a pretty unusual anglicization that barely resembles the original name, and anywhere in the world you may happen to encounter someone with my name, you know they can trace their heritage back to my home town.

And if you try to go much further back from that, the trail kind of goes cold. You can kind of make some educated guesses at which regions in their various old countries the different branches of my family came from, but not much more than that, except on the aforementioned polish side, some of those ancestors were a little more recent immigrants (though still well-before my time) and we have some communication with some relatives in Poland. Nothing regular, but once in a while someone on either side reaches out to see how things are going, and we know enough that if we really wanted to we could probably track each other down if we ever ended up in each other’s countries.

But overall, my family history pretty much begins with my great-great(or so) grandparents arriving in America and settling in my hometown.

2000ish km

At 2 km from the former hospital. Nowadays there is a new one but it’s at like 4 km

About 1600km, and fuck no. Hit the ground running when I was 16 and never called anywhere home again.

Mine is 4,242 km (2,636 mi). I will never go back.

Current, about 300 meters. I live in an apartment a block over from the hospital I was born at.