For my family, this summer will be filled with returning celebrations and reoccurring bucket list items — trips to Oceans of Fun or planting our folding chairs on Weston's Main Street during the Fourth of July fireworks in the same place as the year before. Looking forward to these festivities year after year is becoming quite sentimental for me, as I have actually now lived in my home in Weston for longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. By the age of 14, I lived in seven different places across America. While my home life and family were stable, our address was not. Home was my family, not a place — our place was always changing.
As an adult, I continued this trend, expanding on this moving theme by stretching its limits to other continents with unfamiliar languages and cultures. My husband and I met in high school while working at Best Buy in Liberty. Until we moved to Italy with the military, he had only ever lived in the Kansas City area and seemed to have intrinsic knowledge of it. I was always sort of jealous of the way he just knew our Midwestern city — he knew the established restaurants, how to navigate without asking for directions, had childhood memories of places we now take our own children and could recognize the changing landscape as occupants of strip malls changed hands or new structures went up in places that used to be fields for cattle to graze. This was such a foreign idea to me — I was so in awe that someone could know a place so well. A distant wish of mine was to someday be greeted by a familiar face in my favorite coffee shop and ask if I wanted my usual. I’d never had the opportunity to have a usual.
We’ve been back in Kansas City for six years now and it’s strange, having a place that you’re from. I’m still not sure if I’m “from” here. Whenever I’m asked this question, I must calculate what kind of answer I want to give. While I often feel that itch — the itch to start over and rip the baby roots that are starting to grow beneath my feet — I also, at times, revel in this foreign feeling of belonging to a place.
We return to the Platte County Fair year after year and I long for the sameness. I look forward to riding the same rides, grabbing a corn dog from the same stand, eating a snow cone with my kids on the same picnic table and watching the demolition derby from the same bleacher seats.
As the years pass, I watch the fields along the highway back to our home change from soybeans to corn to hay and back again, cycling through the years. My camera lens repeatedly focuses on the everyday happenings in our flyover state as I process what it means to live here. My photography is starting to become a study of this place, figuring out what home and belonging mean as I reinvent that for myself, imagining a future in which my children have a place they know inherently and are from.
For the past six years, I've looked forward to photographing the local Platte County Fair. My camera often trains on teenagers who travel in packs, giggling and gossiping and completely carefree. Photographing the county fair is a tradition I look forward to every year and I think they are some of the times I’ve been happiest taking pictures.
We’ve been back in Kansas City for six years now and it’s strange, having a place that you’re from.