54 thoughts on “Weekend Question Thread”

  3. Childhood: Spring Branch (close burb to Houston, TX)
    Tweens & HS: Cypress,TX
    With lots of time spent at my Grandparents when they lived out in Hempstead! 🙂
    Might not have always been the perfect childhood, but there were many great memories!
    Elspeth

  4. Gee, this joint is lousy with Texans…but in a good way.
    San Antonio. Grandparents in Houston, got to ride the train to visit them. Loads of fun.
    Grandmother was a china paint artist…her home had this wonderful turpentine smell that I loved. She was always painting and then firing these lovely pieces in her kiln. Lots of fun as a kid who had a bit of artistic talent to be able to paint things and then see the permanent results later on.

  6. Virgo – Rockport?! 🙂 I remember a family get-together down there for 4th of July way back in da day. I was like 3 or 4. The fireworks over the water. 🙂 Good times.
    Elspeth

  7. Washington, Kansas, Washington, Texas and Washington. A military brat with no roots until I got out of the military myself.

  8. Born in Monte Vista, CO. Grew up in and consider my hometown Grand Forks, North Dakota.
    Dontchaknowyashureyubetcha

  9. Fulton Co. New York. BTW, despite what Bono says, you can’t go home…
    I’m about to leave it again for the last time in my life.

  11. A very small farming town in Missouri – population about 300. Ya want small town values? I got em.

  12. Dowagiac Michigan, South Bend Indiana, La Romana Dominican Republic, Melbourne Florida and finally Coconut Grove Florida. Just as strange as it looks.

  14. cuddlefish – i love that BB thread. I love that whole site.
    I grew up inDuxbury, MA – a nice town full of rich people, of which I am not one.
    We never vacationed, my folks drove old cars, and my siblings and I got great educations (surrounded by kids with coke habits and european ski vacations). Thanks mom and dad!

  17. I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, but I grew up in my parents’ semisuburban subdivision neighbourhood between London, Ontario and Komoka, which is probably too small to show on many people’s maps. 🙂 That probably has something to do with why I’m so dedicatedly urban these days, also given that I don’t drive.

  18. Raised 18 years in the same house in Windsor, CT, oldest town in the state, founded 1633.
    Yankee detectives
    Are always on the TV
    ‘Cos killers in Connecticut
    Work seven days a week
    The 1939 play ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ was based on real murders that occured at a boarding house in Windsor.

  19. mdh – Woo hoo! Fellow New Englander in da house.
    We’re like Midwesterners minus one helping of friendly plus one helping of stubborn.

  21. Born in Honolulu (paradise), removed from paradise to Kansas (hell) at the age of ten months where I was raised. Escaped from hell in ’98 and moved to Las Vegas (Gomorrah) where I currently reside.
    Still contemplating suing the parents for orphan status after being drug from Hawaii to Kansas before I could form some memories of my earliest childhood.

  24. First two years in Arlington, VA, then 2 years on the Naval base in Philadelphia, next 13 years in Hamburg, NY (daddy retired from the Navy, then from life). To Boston in 1965 at age 18, and I’ve been one place or another near there ever since. Though I did my “growing up” in Western NY I consider myself a New Englander, though I never successfully picked up the accent.
    Peace, V.

  26. Hi Athena, I hear it’s your birthday, it’s my birthday too!
    At least someone at Eschaton said it was.
    I grew up in a town of 16,000 (now it’s close to 60k), in East TN. I had a mostly wonderful childhood. Lots of neighborhood kids to play with, decent schools and we were allowed to ride our bicycles anywhere we wanted. I wouldn’t want to live there now, but it was a nice place to grow up.

  28. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Moved to the Houston area with my mom when I was 3-4 years old. Moved again with my parents when I was sixteen to a small town an hour and a half north of Harrisburg, PA. Experienced culture shock like never before, ’til I moved from NYC to New Orleans after college.

  29. Born in Donora, PA, site of air so toxic it killed more than a dozen people on Halloween night, 1948.
    My family thought it would be best to move on.
    I grew up in little towns all over Pennsylvania, NJ, upstate NY and Maryland.

  30. Stamford (winters) and Madison (summers) Connecticut
    Think “Ice Storm”…that was my life

  31. Born in Kuwait, moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1991 because of Iraqi Invasion and Gulf War 1 after eight months in Chennai, India. Then, Madison, WI and now New Orleans, LA. Still growing up.
    BTW, A, your book and you are mentioned in the latest edition of the UW L&S newspaper.

  33. A little fart of a town called Lonesome Dove. Oh wait, that was Augustus McRae.
    I grew up in a little fart of a town (pop. 600 then) called Sussex, Wisconsin.

  34. Lived in a log cabin in a tiny town in the piney woods called Perkinston, Mississippi until I was five, then moved a few miles north to a smaller house (although more suitable for my dad’s Steinway grand) in a larger town called Wiggins.
    Spent 90% of my summers, and the happiest times of my life, in a rambling 1870’s home in the hamlet of Coffeeville, Alabama, where everyone knew me – although I didn’t know them – as “Mayor Myrick’s great-grandbaby”. (Nothing went on there. He was mayor until 2 weeks short of his 97th birthday.) My Grandma was a retired teacher who was a talented amateur artist – oils – so the scent of turpentine is one that recalls fond memories for me as well, abo gato. Turpentine and the honeysuckle vine that grew just outside the open window of her back-porch-cum-studio.
    And now, sitting here in Western Kentucky, with the windows open and a baseball game on the radio, listening to the Goldberg Variations and remembering early fall evenings at my Grandma’s, I’m overcome with a wave of nostalgia for fig preserves and a cold biscuit from breakfast.

  35. Born in Florida, moved through Mass, Conn, DC, but really grew up on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, mostly in Trappe, MD (pop at the time 600-700.

  36. Poplar Bluff, MO. Hometown of “Designing Women” creator Linda Bloodworth and NCAA player of the year Tyler Hansbrough of the UNC Tarheels basketball team. I’m one of only six known liberals in southeast Missouri. Thank God for Left Blogsylvania!

  37. Born and spent the first five years of my life at the foot of Pike’s Peak in Boulder, Colorado. Moved to Alexandria, VA. I drove by Union Station today and remembered that five year old girl who walked out of that train station across the street from the US Capitol. I sent love across the web to her: hang in there; don’t take too much shit.
    Been here ever since.

  38. Born in Garden City, Long Island (home of Roosevelt Field, where Lindburgh took off for his flight over the Atlantic), then moved toBradenton FL (on the Gulf coast, on the south side of Tampa Bay) when I was 3. When I was growing up the beach waseh, what’s the big deal? Because we were born in NY, my sister and I were forever tagged as yankees by the neighborhood kids.
    Now that I live in rainy Vancouver WA, heaven is a 90° beach. I always rent a convertible whenever I go home (despite the family history of melanoma) because living in the Pac NW I can never get enough of the sun.

  40. Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1959. Moved to a 40-acre farm in the Ozark foothills in 1966. Moved back to West Texas in 1973. Ain’t apt to leave West Texas again, although I do hanker for more open space than city now.

  43. Celeryville, Ohio.
    Yup, really. I’m there now – seeing my Mom through her hospice stay.

  46. I aged from 6 to 16 between Catonsville and Ellicott City, Maryland in the 1950’s. I’m 64 now but still not sure that I’ve grown up, though I have grown out!

  47. like most everybody else who’s already commented, i was born in one place (white plains, ny), lived a while another place (ridgefield, ct), then some more places (ibadan, nigeria; las palmas, gran canarias; and newtown, ct). in my case, i was dumped out of the parental moving van in boston, ma as it continued on its way. my dad was an electrician.
    i think there are a lot of good things about having lived so many places but at the same time it was very hard because i didn’t have an opportunity to do much more than say hello and good-bye. i met a lot of people but i never really got to know any.
    as a consequence, i’m lousy at parties.

  49. Buffalo NY my first 15 years (1947-62), then rural central Fla. outside Orlando for 2 years before my folks moved into the city, where I attended my 3rd h.s. in 4 years.
    Undergrad years in Tampa, then went to Washington DC for grad studies. Been in the DC area ever since except for 2 years away while in the Army (good morning, Vietnam!)

  50. Greeley, Colorado. Home of da Bears (that’s University of Northern Colorado Bears to you) and the Bulldogs (my alma mater, University High). Woof. My dad taught at UNC for 35 years (theatre arts).
    Tried to leave twice, but I keep coming back. I lurves my mountains and all the sun. And the fact that I’m as far away from sharks as I can possibly get.

  52. Born in Albuquerque, NM a long time ago and raised in all the small towns up and down Hwy 66.

  53. In what used to be the far southwestern end of Phoenix, a little neighborhood just a few yards south of the (dry) Salt River surrounded by cotton fields…it’s all built up now, but it was pretty much the middle of nowhere up until a few years after i moved away.
    The most recent people to own the house i grew up in got foreclosed on, and if i had the money to even think about it, i’d be half tempted to buy it back.

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