Dear Editor,
I enjoyed your editorial “What Defines ‘Home’?” in Oct. 16 issue of the Independent-Reporter. You mention Wichita, the place you grew up, and write, “Do I consider it my hometown? I’m not sure.”
I feel the same way about the place I grew up, St. Joseph, Mo.
 My parents mostly grew up in Ellsworth, graduating as part of the Ellsworth High School Class of ‘55, which my dad represented at their 70th reunion in May. After he married my mom and completed his military service, they lived briefly in Cameron, Mo., where I was born, before moving to St. Joseph.
I grew up looking forward every year to our Thanksgiving and Christmas trips to Ellsworth to be with their parents, my grandparents (Torrey and Inez Fox on my dad’s side, and Barbara and Tom Foote on my mom’s side), for the holidays.
Sometimes we would make trips to Ellsworth for graduations, weddings, and funerals. Though we loved the familiar rituals of fresh-baked kolaches, sitting in front of the fireplace until we thought we’d catch on fire, and gifts and turkey and trimmings, we sometimes griped about the long drive.
As I got older and became interested in rocks, geology and history, I started to enjoy the changing landscape, which changed from rolling farmland between St. Joe and Topeka to the alien landscape of the flint hills between Topeka and Ellsworth. 
On one trip, I found a T-shirt in Salina that said, “Welcome to Kansas: Miles and Miles of Nothing but Miles and Miles” that I wore for years. 
Despite the joke, I had secretly fallen in love with the weird fossils that my dad’s mom collected, the even weirder Mushroom Rock state park, the deep sandstone depressions thought to be buffalo tracks, and the hilltop with a hole through it, said to be a Native American peephole for warily watching settlers grinding their way across the prairie.
I left St. Joe for college in 1984, and I haven’t lived there since. A decade later my wife and I moved to St. Louis, where we had our daughters and I began reading and writing about the history of the Gateway City.
Like you, when I visit St. Joe to visit my dad, it feels more like “the place I grew up” than my hometown. Some things have changed, some seem the same, but not much of it feels like me.
 If anything, St. Louis feels more like my hometown, which it is for our girls. But I almost feel like Ellsworth is a strong contender, too. 
The quiet downtown streets, the mysterious remains of Black Wolf, where my mom’s mom spent her early years, the brick streets, Preisker Park’s fossil-pocked stonework — these things, in this place, shaped me in ways that I am only now beginning to understand.
Tim Fox
St. Louis