Here is the prompt:
Forgive the repetition from earlier posts. Also it might be unfinished, or at least ending in a strange place, but that’s the nature of a timed prompt.
What if home is not a place but a feeling? Not original. Begin again.
What if home is a favorite author? A totetable collection of pages that opens worlds and never lets you down? A writer whose storytelling makes you swoon and whose characters grab you from the get-go. What if home is the space between Best Buy and the highway? No man’s land.
I wanna gather up all my tops and cut up the shirts with stains. Today? A faint coffee blotch mid-chest. Which leads me to say: home could be not caring about all that.
Home these days is to worry, worry, worry. To be infuriated and overwhelmed and embarrassed and deeply out of sorts. Our country, in other words, our country defies home. This regime turns home inside out. It shits on the founding fathers. It acts as middle-man for the bottomless greed of those in office.
I sit cross legged in a mid-century modern chair in a mid-century modern house. Outside helicopters offer occasional menace. Counterpoint: the neighbor’s water feature. Ah!
Ravens are much bigger than crows. I don’t know if they’re smarter or not but I can’t help feeling that every time I’m on the driveway or out on the deck, they’re sizing me up. On the path that winds around Mount Washington, they dropped walnuts in our path. Near misses. “Oh, that’s on purpose,” my brother would tell us later.
I was not one of the 20,000 people that walked shoulder to shoulder in downtown LA this past weekend. Glendale’s closer and I didn’t go there either. The tension around staying put surprised me. If I’d had a vehicle I could comfortably drive (not my brother’s truck, that’s for sure), I’d have left him with my husband and at least driven by to honk and show support, my tiny “8647” sign on the dash. But I can barely get in the truck, never mind drive it, and while I know some parts of Glassell Park and East LA, I don’t know the way to Glendale.
How easily I am undone here. I can’t find shit in the kitchen – the rasp, the second cutting board, the meat thermometer, a mixing bowl for Christ’s sake. None of the knives are sharp, turning the pink hump of a shallot into an adversary. There’s no oven fan meaning that every time you open its door, furnace-like heat blasts out and you better not have your face too close. It also means cooking lamb chops stove top set off the smoke alarms, necessitating dashing about setting up floor fans, opening doors. Needless to say, I prefer cooking at home
So maybe home is where you can find things in the kitchen.
Every other plant here has spines. Spontaneous weeding, which is how I typically weed in Massachusetts, is not a good idea here given how close many of the invasive grasses and clovers are to nasty cacti. The nettles are no fun either. Gloves, a must.
On the pleasant side: a lozenge of a swimming pool filled with salty warm water. What a pleasurable way to end an afternoon! A dunk. A paddle. A blowing of air into bubbles, life-affirming bubbles.
The sun sets over the fence that lines the pool – making the giant ficus back there go inky black. Which reminds me, when I get home, the 350-year-old beech behind my neighbor’s house will be gone. Will it even feel like home anymore?
The stupid limits I set. Once it was: when and if New England Mobile Book Fair closes, I’m leaving Newton. Then it was, if that copper beech ever comes down, I’m leaving Newton. I looked at that tree while prepping veggies or while rolling out a dough. The setting sun glared through its branches, visible from backyard, deck, family room, and dining room. Upstairs from the bed, I might see the moon wander through its dark tangle of branches.
It got sick. Many beeches in New England are getting sick. It’s not 120° temperatures or catastrophic sudden flooding, or fires taking out entire neighborhoods, but it is climate related and a grievous loss.
Imagine how it might feel (speaking of trees and regimes and protests), if our government embraced the urgent need to slow global warming. Imagine if that corrupt pretense that it’s a hoax dropped away and reality shone through, its terrifying dimensions relieving compared to denial. What if our government acted like having a future mattered more than satisfying the energy lobbies? What then?
A collective sigh. A dropping of the shoulders. A leaning into whatever it would take (and trust me when I tell you it’s not recycling). Rather, we’d feel determined and maybe even optimistic, willing as communities to endure hardships in service of the future.
Truth, in fact, has been sacrificed to profit to Murdoch to Trump and his dumb shit children, to the tech bros, who now want to violate whole communities to keep their crypto and AI factories cool.
Five million people is a lot of people. Trump coming home early from the G7 because he’s tired, defeated, out of his league, and a shell of a man is evident to everyone. I applaud the European sneers and Canadian interruptions. Our national demon spends too much time insulated. Oh, look, there’s Pam Bondi singing his praises and declaring burners of Teslas domestic terrorists. But a murderer of Democratic lawmakers? Not so much. So maybe he doesn’t quite know how incredibly reviled he is.
The reels from all over the country bringing us to tears. How unified and gratifying the crowds! The vast protests in Idaho, for Christ’s sake. North Carolina, North Florida, Oklahoma. This was not exclusively a Boston, LA, Chicago, New York thing by any stretch. He had to have seen a minute or two of coverage? But even if he’d been shielded from it all, every single world leader whose hand he shook had seen the footage and understood the import.
So I guess what I’m saying is that a return to sanity would feel like going home. This isn’t wishing for some mythic past that never existed, but for a kind of normalcy that might allow us to progress one foot after the other. Or maybe even running to preserve the oceans, the ice caps, clean water, trees.
If hate could take a person down, Trump would be long dead. How often that wish comes up in conversation amazes me. Everyone, not just my radical friends, but all of them, wish him dead and say so.
I’m slow to reply these days. This post is too good to let slide by. Reading your blog always makes me feel better. Or if not better then in good company.
I have often thought about the concept of home. Probably most strongly when I was in a predicament like the outback of Australia or some other dumb and dicey situation I got myself into. But today it is even more scary.
What is home when neighbors can’t be trusted. When it’s not safe to move either. Where to go? Run? Hide? Fight?
I wish we could get back to normal. Every day the senile mofo whips up something even more deadly than the day before and i feel completely powerless to do anything about it.
Wishing someone dead doesn’t work. I tried that before for years. Maybe if everyone wishes him dead. Millions of bad vibes sent his way? No sooner said than done. And I do believe miracles happen. That’s what I’m banking on.
And the loss of ancient trees. Such heartbreak. I still mourn mine. Too many things to mourn these days. Maybe the crows are trying to tell you something? I love them. And Try to lure them over with peanuts. I think they laugh in my face. At least it works with the cardinals. They are kinder.
Hi Ginny. Good to hear from you. Every day something scarier for sure. Now war with Iran?
I don’t know if I believe in miracles but I do believe in the collective power of determination and good will. That’s why the clips from the 14th made me (almost) cry.
The hate I believe is pure reflex. I don’t think friends mention it as a solution to anything, more out of surprise at the intensity of the feeling.
I don’t recognize the country I now live in. It’s an even worse Emperor without clothing story going on now…..
Here at my brother’s house the news is on A LOT. What’s happening is alarming. And ever sickening. There’s trump in his dumb baseball cap making reality-show type pronouncements. Gawd.
Bravo!!! You’ve said so well what I’m feeling, what millions of us are feeling.
Thank you Sherrie! Appreciate that.
When we sold our home in Ca and decided to become nomads, traveling about the country, seeking my Dad’s America, the promise I made to him on his death bed, at first, I felt somewhat adrift. In carrying out his wish, I left notions of home behind, realizing that it would be carried within me. Some places were more welcoming than others and yes TN, I am speaking to you. Our time in TN coincided with the Obama years and in the little unincorporated area that we chose to rent a home, it took some guts to carry my Obama tote, wear my Obama pin, certainly.not a popular choice.
Maui and Washington were kindred souls even if it was slightly disorienting to go from spending Christmas in a tropical island, wearing shorts and a t-shirt as we decorated our little tree to the land of snow and ice and shoveling snow for 5 months, still neighbors in both places as well as locals, felt like friends. A few of them still send us Christmas cards.
Texas turned out to be a surprise, welcoming and when people held to their beliefs, there was courtesy and interest in hearing about us and what bought us to Texas; that Texas, in my opinion, no longer exists..
And now we are here in New Mexico, me a native Californian, Rich a native Minnesotan. This is the longest we have lived in one place, since selling our CA home but is it home? Does the familiar of living in a place for over 12 years make it home?
In quiet moments, I think about what makes people seek homes far away from their original places. I would ask myself, would I have had the courage that my parents did to leave their countries, seeking opportunities, knowing that they would never return? Yes, I did leave my home, traveled about America, but never left my country. Still, these days, the unrealistic pull to leave, sometimes, colors my days…
I sometimes forget what a gypsy life you’ve led! I wonder if that Texas is still around but overshadowed by red folks. I e heard it said that it’s a voter-suppressed-purple-state.
I hope people dig deep, find their resilience, and help steer this country back to something. Maybe not any sort of international standing any time soon, but to a society committed to the Constitution.
Oh Dee…..I am SO exhausted and soul-sick by loss these days …loss of everything we thought we knew, loss of what was, of sanity, of safety ( even if it was erroneous to believe it) of identity ( personal & national) and yes, the grievous loss of giant majestic trees. Every morning ( like your every evening beech) I gaze out at my two sister pines 😭
I am thankful that the only tragedy from this mega-ton lightning strike is the sacrifice of a tree, 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
but in my heart that is tragedy enough.
I find myself weeping at everything
Your question of “home” really gives me tough gristly food for thought to chew on.
Loss of a landmark tree is a terrible loss. The fact that the tree probably saved lives doesn’t make it less of a loss. That violent rending of air, wood fiber, roots, and ground will take some time to recover from!
Absolutely
Dee~ Such a heartfelt post. As I read, I consider how your “home” entwines with my “belonging”…
The grief is far and wide and something to be reckoned with every day, including the loss of a tree.
We somehow got onto these Swiss Mountains rock slides, floods, permafrost/glacial disruptions…which led to volcanos and earthquakes…making me thing that the world is screaming out…but who is listening?
xo
Yes. I saw that Mt Etna blew recently.
Yes, saw that. We first got hooked watching what was happening in Blatten. Seeing a whole village gone.
What in the world?
I’d seen a bit of that catastrophic slide but thanks for this video. It added a lot of dimension to the disaster.