A Place to Call Home
15 August 2007
If I listen closely enough, the rhythms of life pass through the baseboards of this old house. This rhythm does not ever fade, it never stops, or even slows. I have seen many houses, strained to hear many footsteps coming home. Wanted my own feet to find home again. But I hear the rhythm. Life's only constant is change itself and I have to bend or I will break.
I keep shifting, place to place, time to time, one social gathering to another. I cherish each as they pass away through my hair like the wind in the desert I miss so much. Like the fleeting smell of wisteria on a porch in another time, I can almost smell it again. But I will never know that softness of sage and warm wind on my face again. I can visit the desert, but that moment is gone. I will plant wisteria some day, let my senses wash away the cares of the evening and just exist with the pure sweet smell. I will drift home to all the places I have called home at once.
I think home is simply the place where one remembers happiness. Even if, in the moment, we do not recognize it for what it is. I have many homes, some real, others not. I am at home in a city only exists in my head, soaring marble lace and sculpture and ageless women walking the streets. I am at home on a desolate prairie with only a wolf for company. I can feel the grass waving, tickling my palms as I hope. I am at home in a room on a space ship where there is the smell of leather books and a worn carpet beneath my bare feet.
I am at home when I smell the green of living things in the forest all around me and when I cannot hear anything but the wind caressing evergreen bows high above. I am at home on two different summer porches where the wisteria blesses the air around as it grows persistently on the trellises. I am at home in my unit in my hospital, less sterile than I imagined it would be, kept much more like a home by the family that lives there than like a place of work. I am at home on my university campus, music swooping on the breezes between the ancient cherry trees. Here in my quiet apartment, I feel safe, and at home. I am at home in the lonely desert of Easter Washington and on Mount Hood in Oregon. The rough pass there leads to another home, also a desert, but alternately covered in thick white foam or dry and comfortingly warm with again the smell of sage wantonly surfing the air in the afternoons.
I am also at home with the cobblestones of Paris under my feet and in the south, where the lavender and sunflowers wave under a glimmering sun. There is a rose garden in Vancouver Canada, where I feel at peace, and so at home. I am at home on the back of a motorcycle, but only if William is driving. I am at home in a small tent city that exists but for two days out of every year, called Greenwood Shire. A city far from here, with monuments, marble, pomp, circumstance and desperation calls me. Its pride needs me in a way I do not yet understand.
Maybe, with all these places to call home, it is no wonder I long for home nearly all the time. Even when I am in one of them, the others call, summon, beckon, plead, order me to return one day.