Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.
I grew up watching movies where it was common for the character to be living as adults in the town they were born in, and sometimes even in the very house they were born.
As an immigrant, I thought this was a missed opportunity. In my head this is what it means to be a local.
My wife on the other hand has been migrating for so long that she has no ties to any land. Not of her forefathers which she has never been to. Not of her grandfather which she also has never been to. Nor of her fathers given that he hates the place. still has longing for the land of her childhood but she is not allowed to go back to. And now she is here, too detached to continue to live in the same place as us.
Gregory Aldrete opens his Great Courses lecture series on ancient history by noting that although most of us engage with history through works of art and accounts military conquest, 90 to 95 percent of all people living back then would have been born on a farm, spent their lives tilling soil interrupted by the occasional calamities of flood or disease, and then died likely not having travelled more than a few kilometers away.
When my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.