{"id":5244,"date":"2012-05-13T19:36:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-13T19:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/?p=5244"},"modified":"2012-05-11T19:38:33","modified_gmt":"2012-05-11T19:38:33","slug":"far-away-from-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/far-away-from-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Far Away From Home . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nI don’t know about you, but I had no desire to move back to my hometown once I was finished with college and then graduate school and then law school. \u00a0I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; a tony suburb of Detroit, a lovely place to grow up, but not where I wanted to live as an adult. \u00a0But generally, when people ask me where I’m from, I say Detroit. \u00a0I say Detroit for lots of reasons, but mainly because that’s where my family is from and continues to reside. \u00a0By my family, I mean my parents (both were just about born and raised in Detroit), my grandparents and all of my extended family (I have a pretty big extended family – my grandmother, effie of<\/span> effie’s paper<\/a>, had 8 siblings and a few of them also had 9 kids … their kids have kids and so on and so on). \u00a0Most of my family, with the exception of my immediate family, my mom’s sister, my grandfather and a few others of us all live in Detroit. \u00a0So you see, Detroit is home. \u00a0Except it isn’t. \u00a0We, meaning my immediate family, don’t go to Detroit for Thanksgiving and Christmas anymore because we don’t have a family homestead to bunk in. \u00a0Which means that I only get to see my extended family when I go back to Detroit for a wedding or a funeral. \u00a0But, with the advent of email, text messaging and FaceBook I have been able to keep up with my extended family more now than I ever have. \u00a0I know who’s kids are doing what, where people have traveled to and what’s going on in their daily lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve been to Detroit twice in the past year. \u00a0The first time was last June for my little cousin Jessica’s wedding; that’s her above on her BIG day in her second outfit of the wedding to end all weddings. \u00a0No matter how tall and statuesque (I had on 5″ heels, she was in flip-flops at that point), she’ll always be my little cousin. \u00a0The second time was last week for her funeral. \u00a0No she wasn’t ill. She died unexpectedly from a blood clot that seems to have resulted from foot surgery. I’m still reeling from her passing, we all are. \u00a0She was 8 years younger than me and as a kid she sometimes got on my nerves, but she was cute and funny and well, she was my cousin. \u00a0You just endure cousins, right? \u00a0They’re family and they know you and know what you were like way back when. Then she went to college and grew up a bit and pledged my sorority; she was so excited that we had another bond to share. Honestly, I didn’t think about it the way she did at the time, but over the past four or five years because of text messaging and FaceBook and my wedding and her wedding, we had an opportunity to form an adult relationship . . . Don’t get me wrong, she was still my little cousin (yes, she towered over me and could surely beat me down had she tried) and she still got on my nerves from time-to-time, but she was my cousin and she had become my friend. \u00a0Being in Detroit for her wedding surrounded by family and then being in Detroit again last week for her funeral surrounded by family, made me long for home in a way I haven’t since I moved out of Michigan in 1991.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you live near your relatives, spend time with them when you can. If you don’t, stay in touch with them. \u00a0I am so thankful that my annoying little cousin wormed her adult-self into my world and my heart. \u00a0I will, like her husband and her mother and her siblings and her aunts and uncles and her friends and the other cousins she left behind, miss her dearly. \u00a0But, I am so glad that although I am far away from home we were able to be close.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know about you, but I had no desire to move back to my hometown once I was finished with college and then graduate school and then law school. \u00a0I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; a tony suburb of Detroit, a lovely place to grow up, but not where I wanted to live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5244"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5265,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5244\/revisions\/5265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalynjohnson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}