Last winter, after another fall sent my father on another trip to the emergency room, he found himself in a nursing home, and I found myself making repeated trips back to the pristine Chicago suburb where I'd spent my adolescence two decades earlier. Not long after I left for college, my parents decamped to Florida, and my brother moved away, too — but they'd all since returned, back to this supposed utopia of highly ranked schools, upscale chain stores and immaculate lawns, my brother to settle down with his own wife and kids, my parents to grapple with my father's descent into dementia after series of strokes.
I hate it here, I think as I drive.
