Another Day in the Country
Here I stand, at home
© Another Day in the Country
Do you ever wonder, as I do, what it means to “come home?”
I’ve called so many different places, “home” in my lifetime.
In the beginning, home was a little 650-square-foot clapboard farmhouse on a dirt road four miles outside of Ramona. The road had no name. Now it’s called Pawnee.
Then home suddenly became a two-room apartment in the basement of a dormitory in Lincoln, Nebraska, where my father purposed to go to Union College. I was 4 years old.
Through the next 12 years of my life, home was an assortment of apartments, rental houses, and parsonages in Kansas and then Colorado.
Somewhere along this journey, my stationary “heart-home” became Grandma’s house on the outskirts of Ramona. But then, when I was in my teens, she and Grandpa up and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to live hear Aunt Verna.
Within a few years, I’d married, and home was now bisected into a variety of structures, some more pleasantly remembered than others — and home-home was wherever my parents and little sister were living at the time.
Throughout 80 years of living, I’ve come to realize that I’m really pretty good at making a home-home.
I’m an artist, and so my surroundings quickly take on the accoutrements of artistry.
There is color. There are fabrics and feathers collected to please the eye. There’s things and stuff, an interesting table, odd chairs, a collection of dishes — good food. There are pictures and paintings on the walls and an arrangement on a shelf. This conglomeration of possessions spell home to me.
There are peaceful spots, inside and out — chaos in places. There are flowers and trees, even if they are planted in moveable pots, in anywhere that I call home. There cozy corners for reading and spaces for lounging — even if I don’t often sit in the chairs or lounge on the outside benches.
When I travel to California and someone asks, “Where are you going?” I answer, “Home.”
After all, I lived in that very house, above the Napa Valley, for more than 30 years. My husband and I planned that house, built that house. I still nurture that house and own that house where my daughter lives.
And yet, at the forefront of my mind when I go home is the fact that my daughter, who always has known that house as home and still lives there, is now living in her home. It is not really mine. I am a guest in my own house, a visitor, even at times a stranger in this very familiar place.
Meanwhile, when I come back to Kansas, I walk in the door of my mother’s house, the one we built for her — to her tastes, her ideas of comfort, with her funds. It is where I now live. I call it home even though part of this place will always be foreign to me.
I’ve made it my home with my clutter, my old pieces of furniture, my paintings and dishes, and books, books, books, — my place, my space even though it is not the kind of nurturing space I would have built for my very own home.
Far from it. I hate the darkness of the interior, the lowering ceilings, the lack of light, the heating that comes from the ceiling, the pale carpets that collect dirt so easily, the windows that resist opening, the railing that seems fragile.
When I go home to California, so much is different. As the years pass, I recognize fewer people, fewer places. Everything changes in 25 years of absence, even though I visit.
In 2000, when I came back to Ramona, there still were houses I recognized, relatives I knew living in town, people’s names I remember my grandmother talking about, and some of them were still here and still the same — the woman who was petty, the man who bragged too much, the one who didn’t work.
My grandmother’s loves and grudges hung on my shoulders like an old cape dragging on the ground behind me but still warm and comforting, tied close around my neck.
“Why would you come back to Ramona?”
Everyone asked this — my father most of all.
“I worked hard to get you out of there,” he chastened, shaking his head.
He could not imagine, until he was dying, why I would find this place intriguing. And then, I think he knew.
It was the memories tied to this place — both good and bad. It was the old farmers he remembered as a boy. It was the memory of his high school buddies, who he played basketball with and won a trophy.
Home also was the sumptuous tables my grandmother managed to set in the midst of poverty, the meals she prepared. Home was the sounds of the windmill creaking at night when you went to bed and the call of the doves on the telephone wires during the day.
These are strange things to call home. The outside trappings, even the memories, often disappoint us. I realized this morning that home, that true homing spot, is not in California or even Ramona. It’s not on the corner of 5th and D Sts. in my mother’s house. It is in me, my body, my mind, may heart, so long as it functions.
Like Martin Luther proclaiming, “Here I Stand,” this body was given to me. It contains parts of all my people who came before. This body was given to me as a dwelling place, a home made not of bricks or mortar but of flesh and blood — the only place my spirit truly resides.
My body, like a tree beside a creek with roots running deep in the soil, is at home, in Ramona, spending another day in the country.