Libby Emmons: ‘Get Out of Cities’: I Left the Sirens of New York City for the Church Bells of Rural America

“Honey, we left!” When I moved to Lower East Side in 2002, my grandmother was the one who told me this. My apartment was located just blocks away from Little Italy where she and her grandfather were born more then a half century ago.

When I moved to Brooklyn My grandfather visited me many years later and showed me the Rosalia Bakery that he had built with his father. He pointed out the apartment that he and his grandmother had brought my mother home as a newborn.

My great-grandmother died in the hospital where she was born. It was also where my son was born. All the relatives had left by then: great-aunts/cousins, uncles, and cousins all went. 

My mother had long ago sold her West 66th Street apartment. It was the one that I used to visit on summer vacations. I was the result of New YorkI was one of the most committed residents. Yet, my ancestors had all fled. 

Now, I’m gone.

This is the place I have left, the only place where I felt truly at home. My mother gave me fluorescent socks. This was the place I felt my first real communion with the spirit. 

I have never owned any of the city except my own mind and heart. And I never thought I would ever leave. I would never want to live anywhere else. I didn’t want to be someone else, but I was who I was with the city under my feet and the universe in reach of my outstretched hands. 

Now, I have moved to a small community in a Red state.

On New Year’s Day, I woke up to the sound and vibration of church bells. It was years ago that I had heard them through my apartment windows. In my last apartment, I heard the Muslim calls for prayer and the fog horns from big ships passing through the Verrazano Narrows. 

Children crying out through the walls. Parents screaming in languages I didn’t understand or could not identify. I could hear the shut-in from across the hall crying, doors closing, high heels clicking and loud Spanish soap operas. Heat, traffic jams; cats mewling, traffic jams; honking and cursing; sirens. Chanting anti-Israeli protests. 

Christmas Carols were played by the church bells. Carol of the Bells: What Child is This, Away in the Manger. I felt my heart lift, a physical sensation. My eyes felt tingly with the realization that I had not heard this sound before.

I thought about the culture I left behind, a culture that was not mine and had no trace of what my grandparents would recognize.

For the first time, I felt that I hadn’t left my home, a space of transience, and a place for impermanence. But, I had maybe found one. 

One that I found, despite its unfamiliarity, its country roads and distance from cement and skyline, contained the remnants my ancestral culture. It was one in which even my grandparents, who were Italian immigrants, would see a part of their heritage, what they left behind after they moved to Detroit, then Long Island, Florida.

The theater culture I came to New York to experience, and was a part of, is long gone without the art I love to create. 

Christianity is not a part of the culture of the city. It has no place in its values of loyalty, hard work and communion. If they are still available, they are not in my possession. 

New York is no more a place I can call home or where my son can flourish.

So I fled home. Maybe I have finally arrived.