November 26, 2003
Sleeping in my childhood room this week—new double bed, candlewick spread that was mother's, sheets edged with Aunt Winnie's tatted lace. Room feels neutral, comfortable, welcoming. No barbed wire memories here — the house where I grew up, now faced with new brick, turned forty-five degrees on its foundation toward the sunrise. Home, not home.
walking to the red barn
frosty this morning —
no mother, no father
I look out windows — feel as if I'm in a foreign country. Right window, wrong scene. I haven't been here enough in recent years to acclimate to the skew of the landscape. Where is my old dog, Queenie? Where are all the barn cats?
child's memories
beginnings, endings—
the green lawn
THANKSGIVING DAY, November 27, 2003
From a stool at the breakfast bar, I watch the kids and the puppies. I can't feel the distance of two generations away from this place. I think about the times my husband, Clarke, and I brought our three sons here to the farm. They were the ages of these, my sister's grandchildren. Dreams, memories, all one.
the backyard elm
summer's hideaway —
forty years gone
Thanksgiving dinner's over, food put away, my nieces and nephews gone, puppies gone. Out the windows, dark, cold Kansas night. My son, Nick's on the floor, teaching guitar chords to Spencer. Flashback to Sacramento, twenty years ago — Nick and our friend, Gordon, in my living room. Gordon the teacher, Nick the student.
Nick plays a bass riff
on acoustic guitar —
strums with a copper penny
November 28, 2003
It's the morning after Thanksgiving at the farm, the house where I grew up, the land my dad worked most of his adult life. I sit here on the bed, look out the window again at the old barn, the red cedar hedge my sister planted. I don't feel grounded. It's as if my feet touch alien soil, no matter that I lived here twenty-two years.
one foot in Kansas
one in California —
which steps forward?
My roots are no longer in this ground. Too much has changed. I've been away too long; haven't returned enough. The tie still exists, but it's fragile. All that binds me to this place is a stretch of rich, gumbo soil along the river, one sister, one aunt, and four graves: my mother, my father, my first-born brother, my second-born son.
two small headstones
two angel faces —
the deep earth
I will always come back. I will always be gone. As the song says, "Some things change; some stay the same." I guess I'm both the same and not the same. Mother used to describe unusual people simply as "different." That was always my desire — to be different. To be the person only I could understand; whether I was understood or not didn't matter.
I left; others stayed. No right, no wrong. Tom Wolfe says, "You can't go home again." I'm still not sure.
ancient ocean
once covered this farm —
salt crystals in the well.