I haven't lived in the Midwest for quite some time, but I did grow up there and have a thing for it whenever I go. I do not feel that you necessarily have to remain where you grew up or where you love to continue to have a healthy appreciation and admiration for it! For one the Midwest is a mixed bag of hard working individuals that are resourceful yet are still fair and thorough when it comes right down to it. I've been elsewhere, and you can often fake the funk or pull the wool over their eyes whereas it is hard to do so with Midwesterners. They tell it like it is, yet are always ready to uplift and try to push you along whenever necessary.

I've realized that wherever I go, what I have romanticized about being a Midwesterner I tend to take with me regardless of whatever situation I am in. No matter how much time I spend on the East Coast there is much that will never really change about me. If you haven't been there, the Midwest has the large metropolis and the small towns that you want, the rural atmosphere and the inner city, the churches and the shady hole in the wall not far from wherever you find yourself in the region. It can be quick, though conscientious, fake, yet conspicuously so, bourgeois, if only to the others one is surrounded with, and ghetto, to where you wouldn't want it any other way. I had a lot of fun in the Midwest before I headed East, and often think about the times I enjoyed there.

In all I spent a good 30 years or more in the place and needed a change. I wanted more money, bigger cities (if not denser) and the quick pace I always heard people brag about. It isn't always everything that it is cracked up to be. I could always comfortably afford to live as long as I was working full time. Yet I have to work a lot of overtime just to get by; roads are expensive, housing is outright usury and taxes are ridiculous. But I can make it through just about anything, the Midwest is pretty in the winter, has tons of snow and roads that deteriorate into rubble every other year. Some say it is a violent, depressing place full of crime and lacks opportunity; but you find yourself and who you are, if not who you will be once you see what life has to offer. The filth and the grime of the cities from the factories builds character long after the steam has left and the boilers fail to turn on. I may eventually return to the Midwest, perhaps to die, just to humor myself when I have had my fill of what this country has to offer. Yet too often everything that people feel there is to hate about the Midwest, because it differs from what they know, Midwesterners have grown to love exactly because there is nothing else quite like it you'll find ...

Learn more about this author, Christopher Kendalls.
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