From Around Here

When it’s not clear you have the right credentials.

The metaphor:

I lived in Brooklyn for five years, all in the same apartment. That’s not long enough to become an Official New Yorker, but it was enough that the bartender knew my drink at my favorite restaurant.

I had a few friends who’d been there a decade, and I liked joking that a city worker would be dispatched to their door with a dirty MTA ticket in a frame to recognize their status. Then I asked a coworker who grew up in the Bronx how long it took, in her opinion, to become a resident. “Oh, you don’t,” she said. “If you weren’t born here, we can always tell.”

This past week, four and a half years after moving upstate, I thought about what it means to live somewhere versus to be from there: what makes you a local, an import, or an interloper, and whether or how it matters.

The story:

Delightfully, there are little green buds on the trees at my house and the bush by my grandma’s door. There are flowers blooming in my parents’ yard, daffodils with dainty white and yellow bonnets, crocuses in vibrant purple. Even here in wet and cloudy Second Winter, the plants know better than to wait for sunny days to call it spring.

An Ontario County employee said as much to me on Thursday morning. I was walking my dog on Honeoye’s West Lake Road, where he was working on what looked like a freestanding metal shed. He was older than me, maybe 50s or early 60s, with a blaze orange sweatshirt and a five-inch-long white beard. Sort of a woodsy take on Santa Claus, hunting deer instead of flying with them.

His eyes did twinkle when he saw my dog, which is how we got to talking. After telling me about his new puppy, he explained that the metal shed was one of the lake’s 17 lift stations installed in 1979 to pump sewage uphill. “Helping keep these lakes beautiful!” He gestured towards the water with pride.

I looked where he pointed, quicksilver glinting under slate grey sky. “It really is a beautiful part of the world,” I replied, but couldn’t help adding, “Though I wish the sun would come out.” It had been a week since our last sunny day, and I was starting to get resentful.

Woodsy Santa chuckled. “You must not be from around here!” He was perfectly welcoming, explaining that the cloud cover comes from Lake Ontario, and that his son got fed up and moved to Colorado. But I stayed stuck on that moment, unsure what to say. Am I from around here?

It’s my fourth spring living up the hill from where he and I stood, next to my grandma’s log cabin. My great-grandfather had it built in 1939, after he moved from West Virginia to be a Kodak engineer. My grandparents spent summers there, and we’d visit when I was a kid, swimming and catching frogs. My parents and I were all born in Rochester, 30 miles north, in Monroe County. They raised me in a suburb where the school budget always passed and the airport was a 15 minute drive away.

Then I left for 16 years, coming back when work went remote in 2020. I spend my days on video calls with colleagues based across the country. Do I count as local?

This question had come up a few days before. I’d gone to an event in the town of Honeoye, which sits at the north end of its namesake lake, just like Canandaigua to its east. I technically live in the town of Canadice, named for the lake to the west, but there’s no town center with shops or amenities, just a town hall building where the 1600 residents vote. For a grocery store, post office, gas station, etc., I drive five minutes northeast to Honeoye.

The event was hosted by the Ontario County Democratic Committee. Thirty-five or so people filled the local knitting shop, at the other end of Main Street from the one stoplight in town. I stood in the sign-in line behind two men describing how they live near an alpaca farm. They were speaking to a woman who reacted with recognition. She asked about an intersection, but they corrected her: “The other alpaca farm.” Turns out the one she knew had run out of alpaca.

The woman explained she lives near the nature center on the east side of the lake. Then they turned to me.

“I live up near Harriet Hollister,” I explained, referencing a park named for the woman who’d owned the land. My grandma has a picture with her and her family from when they were neighbors, before Harriet gave her lot to the state.

“Oh, if you stay straight at the big white church? When 37 bends to the right?”

“Exactly!” My grandpa always said that the view from that intersection was the best part of driving to the cabin. Now he’s buried at that church.

We fell silent as the program started. The knitting store owner – and deputy commissioner of elections – explained that they’d be reviewing the open positions, in hopes no local race would gos uncontested. First, she and a few other committee members introduced themselves.

“I’m a Town of Richmond representative,” one said, “but I’m not actually from here – I’m an import!” She added unironically, “I’ve just lived here 26 years.”

There was a murmur around the room of people admitting that they, too, had moved from another town or city. The atmosphere was sheepish, like we’d all been carded trying to buy beer and none of us was really 21. This felt all the more incriminating at a Democratic Party event – Ontario County is purple, but Honeoye and Canadice are Republican strongholds. We weren’t just imported people, we were actively working to undo the political climate we’d infiltrated.

Enthusiasm returned as the facilitators talked about running for office, both as a way to impact local issues and, in campaigning, to build community and connect people with resources. They reeled off facts like which towns choose candidates through a caucus and which simply petition. I felt full of energy – and delicious cookies from the baked good committee, a group of older ladies who confessed they liked kitchens more than canvassing. I’ve been putting my political start-up energy into canvassing in Pennsylvania and phone banking for Wisconsin. I can get the New York Times and call my senators just as easily from my house in the Finger Lakes as I could from my apartment in Brooklyn, but I’m just starting to learn how power works here.

Of course, we’re still affected by what happens at the national level. I went back to Euchre Night on Thursday at the Noble Shepherd brewery. Along with small talk about where we live and the cards we were playing, current events kept creeping in. A woman I’d met last time works at a local company. I asked about her day, which she’d spent on calls about the new tariffs. “It was all the higher-ups,” she said. “I mean, everyone was on there, with the language in front of them, and everyone still had questions.”

Later, her husband was telling me about the aquaponic garden beds he’s built. While he pulled out his phone to show me photos of the tilapia he’d bred in his basement, he rolled his eyes and referenced the recent cuts at HHS. He didn’t give details, just said that he’d been on dozens of calls trying to track down new contacts for a close relative’s health issues, now that the people he’d worked with before were laid off. I didn’t need to know how they voted in order to listen, just glad they could tell that I cared.

After we finished the four twenty-minute games, I closed my bar tab and got in my car. Noble Shepherd is east of Honeoye, on the way to Canandaigua. I turned left out of the lot to head home, scanning for deer in my high beams as Route 20 turned into Main Street. I passed the knitting shop, then turned left at the stoplight and smiled as I drove by the tuned-up lift station. Walking to my door, I could smell wet earth on the soft, warming air. The flowers are blooming here, where they’ve been planted. It’s spring in the place where I live.

The question:

Are you a local where you live? How do you know?

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