on home
As a child we moved a lot, there is no childhood home of which I could return to, every few years a new apartment, when I was 13 my mom bought a house, a single mom who worked a full time job then cleaned houses every weekend and a lot of week nights, I always went with her, my job was to change the garbages in the offices or to use pledge on the woodwork, if I was lucky sometimes Id get to bring my homework, I resented that so much, I hated going to peoples homes to watch my mother clean, my mother who never rested, who never played, who always worked, cleaning the offices of people she knew or homes of elderly folks in our neighborhood. A few years after we bought our house, we lost it, and it crushed her, but it didnt matter we just had to keep moving forward, there wasn't time to grieve or mourn. A few years after that I was an unhoused teenager sleeping on floors of drug dealer apartments, roaches and rats, anything to get away from "home", Id go from apartment to apartment, my grandfather taking me in to help me get on my feet, Id run and drink and move across the country chasing some feeling of home etched in my bones I couldnt find. Id look in people who were cruel and reminded me of wounds deep, Id turn to the land between bus stops, alley ways, dry desert scape yearning for oaks and willow trees. There is so much wrapped up in home, is it a place, a feeling, something you generate for others to take shelter in? Is it where you come from, where you were born, where your ancestors slept and made life? What an ache, the orphaning, the separation of such a thing. Since having children Ive moved four times, settling and unsettling less frequently but changing all the same. When I sold our last house the first house I ever owned, I forgot to take the trim that had my babies heights, I think about it often when I pass the doorway between our kitchen and living room now and see how they've grown in the years we have called this place, home. My mother told me the trim is still there in the old house, it wasn't taken down, the owner never painted over it, what a relief. A relic, a story, a part of our history not erased.
Our home now, two hundred years old, leaking roof, sulfur rich well eroding the pipes, foundation rolling under our feet, electrical issues, structural issues a plenty, more than I can chew really, but home in a time where solace and safety was our hope and dream.
We came here five years ago, from the home where my children saw parents scream and fight and frightened and crying, a place that felt like home that held so much grief and pain in the walls, but also their sweet childhood memories, a complexity we are still untagling today.
I sat on the porch steps overlooking the flower farm ai built in the backyard to get free, it was the summer of 2020, we were starved for more and wanting, on the phone a friend at the time said “ I just want to get rid of this house, I dont want to deal with it, I wish you could just buy it”
and everything changed
A place with land to roam and safety of trees, a place to keep us and grow us and nourish our dreams.
I was love struck, with the land, with the possibility. A place people could gather up for each other, a place where the wild could unravel and we too alongside of it.
Just like the world of foxes and coyotes, owls and field mice, there is a sway, there is pain and violence, love and beauty, there is poison ivy on blueberries, trees breaking and falling, there is so much alongside the seasons changing and feeding us their plenty.
On the phone with an old friend and talking about what's happening she says “ those who have keep”
(My children are awake so I will continue this story when I can….)