Home

Over the last fairly uneventful month, so uneventful in fact I have been hardpressed to write anything worth posting on this blog, I’ve been brooding over the idea of home. I miss Maine but I don’t think that I would trade a sun and flower-filled winter for darkness and ice at this point. I still feel pretty ambivalent about being here though. I have flashes of affection and appreciation for L.A., like when we went to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at the Troubadour a couple weeks ago, or driving down Sunset Boulevard coming home from a movie with the city twinkling below, and my mind is numbing to the unpleasantness of the freeway and traffic as a constant companion on excursions out of the house, so I may profess to like this place someday yet!

Despite my lack of conviction on where I feel I belong, I’ve realized that I’m ready for a home. I want a home, perhaps more deeply than I have in my adult life. I grew up in one house. Well, actually my parents bought it the year before I was born and over my lifetime it has been transformed again and again by their hands into several different houses, now only traces remaining of the one that I remember as a child with lime green seventies wallpaper where mushrooms grew through the rotted floorboards under the sink in the bathroom. But it is the same structure, with some of the same trees and those same two parents living there still. I was lucky. I really had a home as a kid and I knew most every person, cornfield, body of water and hillside. I knew every season and it’s sounds and smells and the angle of the light.

We hardly ever went anywhere though, except to Maine for a few days each summer, and I accrued such a hunger for travel that as soon as I turned 18 I went to college and took every opportunity to move around as much as possible and see everywhere I could. I moved a lot. Ohio, Texas, Boston, Honduras, New Hampshire, Arizona, The Northeast Kingdom, the border of Mexico. I lived in all of these places between the ages of 18 and 23. And in between I went to Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, Paris, London, Slovenia, Croatia and Spain and all over the United States for brief visits pretty much during those same years. I owned nearly nothing and each move was full of wonder and excitement.

Then my first husband and I bought our homestead together, and my life totally changed. That place was, as inconvenient and desolate as it could sometimes be, a near complete embodiment of my ideals. I put my whole heart and soul into making it my own, painting, sewing curtains, searching antique shops and hardware stores, hauling and shoveling and spreading truckloads of manure, pounding fence posts, building a greenhouse, tilling fields, hauling brush, cutting trees and stacking wood, insulating pipes, planting an orchard! This house and land and the way we wanted to live on it were so important to me. I thought I would live there forever. I was only there three years, but it was longer than I have lived anywhere in my adult life, and I settled in like I have no place since. It wasn’t meant to be though, not for me there anyway.

Since my divorce and leaving of the homestead five years ago (this month!), I’ve been on another series of moves, but they’ve held a lot less wonder and excitement, (except perhaps for excitement over the amount of times I can lose and then find again the same bag of Christmas tree ornaments, or wonder at my new husband’s propensity for keeping precious family photos and documents in mildewy boxes sandwiched between 20 year old real estate flyers from Bangor, Maine and muscle-building magazines from the late 1980s), and a LOT more stuff. I moved to a shared apartment on the west end where I had a picturesque little garret which was marred only slightly by a neurotic housemate but then promptly ruined by a new landlord and near constant construction. I moved from there into Tim’s house in South Portland which was already pretty full of everybody else’s stuff and many of my belongings except for clothes and a bookshelf went into the basement. In two years we all moved out of that house and into a smaller house with a better school district, shedding and piling and storing and losing stuff along the way. Then we moved out of there last summer in order to clean it up and rent it out and we went to our farmhouse for two months, where we hurriedly shoved everything into the barn for a month, and then dug some of it out and wrapped it in old blankets to have it hauled out here to California. The rest of it is still sitting there, undoubtedly a playground for mice where hay bales and tractors used to rest through the winter. It’s all been rather unsettling to say the least. I sometimes think of books that I own and haven’t seen for years. I think I know what pile of boxes they are in, but I’m not sure at this point. What ever happened to all of Nick’s clothes from last summer? Where did Shannon’s prom shoes go? Who knows. Perhaps the barn will cough them all up someday…..perhaps not. Our lives and that of much of our stuff have parted ways it seems, to hopefully or haplessly be reunited at some future point.

Over the last few weeks it has become clear that we will possibly be moving again. Possibly pretty soon. There is a good reason for this move though, as there has been for all of our other moves, virtually all having to do with getting better educations for or more time with the kids. This one is happily motivated by the fact that Nick, who hated the public school here, was accepted at and is now attending a nice little progressive private school and he is much happier already. So….we don’t need to pay exorbitant rents to live in this supposedly great school district anymore. My initial reaction to this was a mild depression. I’m not that attached to this place…..it’s very nice but I don’t love it that much honestly. I just don’t want to move anymore.

I’ve been thinking about this, and wondering why I really have a problem with it. It would be better for me to just let go. Become like the wind. I mean this is America, and the era of globalization where we move around like no one else, and many people think nothing of it. We even have all these predictable chain stores set up everywhere so everywhere you go you can fill your house up with the same old stuff purchased on the side of the same identical highways. I just can’t be like that though. I believe in seeing the land and people around you, and looking for what is special and unique about it all. I believe in learning and looking deeper and striving to live lightly on our land. Knowing a place and it’s own native sights and smells and sounds, that must still count for something in this world, right? It’s a conundrum. I’m so ready for a home. Now I live somewhere that I’m not sure I ever want to be my home though, and I don’t know where I belong, and I am starting to question whether the idea of belonging in a place is something that even exists anymore.

But I want it. I want to stake out a corner of this crazy city where I must live part of the year for the next decade or so at least. I want a home where I know the neighbors and the birds and the trees and the smell of the seasons. I want to have a garden and a compost and collect rainwater and live a little more lightly on this ravaged earth.

We went to check out a house today for rent up in Topanga, a rural mountain town just a few minutes north and inland from here where the houses have great yards for dogs and are cheaper though still close enough to drive the kids to their schools. When and if we are ever ready to buy we will look in this area. A young woman showed us around her home on a secluded ridge with a nice deck and some beautiful terraced gardens where she planted fruit trees and once grew vegetables. She and her husband are getting a divorce. She doesn’t want to live there anymore alone and is leaving the gardens and orchard that she built behind to start a new life. Wouldn’t it be ironic, strange, but pleasingly so, if I could take over her lost orchard to replace my own lost years ago? If I took it over with a happy marriage and family and a rebuilt life? That would be sweet like crisp apples or California figs. I don’t think it’s in the cards for me at the moment though, but just the thought of it is something to hope for.