A Home

There was a time that I felt as if I would never leave home. The farthest I had been was to the downtown shopping center. The bakery, the bank, and the bars. And the clothing and shoe shops the salons and the courthouse with a bronze statue pointing skyward at salvation, a salutary boast for our town. Boys and girls running and riding passed fast, and I lumbered even then on thick though movable legs that bore my weight. But I smiled too. I met one of those boys some time later, a year younger though in the same grade and from a different town. He was riding in a car with my friend Sue. He had the blondest hair that shone silver in the sun at the right angle. I was reticent and taciturn toward his slight posturing and his need to shyly rub his shoulder against mine. He pretended not to notice and I pretended harder not to like him. We later traveled west and south and finally home again because of a protesting mother and a protective father. I remember thinking I was sure they wouldn’t like him because of the black eye he wore and the shoes that he didn’t. Or it could have been that he stole a kiss at the window that I sit at now and watch the flowers bloom and the sun shine and the leaves fall and the snow drift, an end that begins and a beginning that does not ever cease. A zero becomes a zero, a one a one and the numbers in between never fail to show their buxom curves and their constricted lines in black and white.  Outside of my life things molted and shed due their course but here things paced like molasses: time, people, my thoughts, the things I love and the things I don’t or stopped loving. Time doesn’t seem to change. People do not see to change. A home only changes for those that belong in its fragile frame.

She leaned forward and looked with care at the sill and the frame of the window. The mark from the rust-speckled pocketknife still flashed its sentiment under layers of white and yellow and sky blue against what was now. “KR+ DJ.” In all of that time she would have had cut her bones out of her skin to leave she couldn’t or wouldn’t. She was back where she was born. Familiar faces make a home and a job at the grocery and a note begging to stay. A room that was your room as a child holds fast to fond farewells and hellos.  For her familiarity does not comfort nor do ancient hieroglyphs carved in a 50-year-old window frame. There was always a hope that they could have made a home in a place as unfamiliar as they were to each other now. That silly saying of “Home is Where the Heart Is” is only true for those that still have hearts she thought. 

My 60th Autumn

I saw a boy raking leaves today. He was outside my window in the next yard raking the silver maple and the elm and the pine needles pushed themselves up against the straight and bent metal of the rake tearing the brittled, mottled leaves. I watched him there a long time. Once he looked up and saw me watching him. The boy waved and I waved back but I don’t think he could tell.  The wind nestled itself against the house, pushed and pulled the leaves from the tidy piles the boy raked. I tried to open the window with my right arm to smell the damp and dead summer but I couldn’t do it. I tried to move my chair closer to the wall but the length of the chrome arm kept me from the leverage I needed. I called to my husband. He was in the kitchen I think because he didn’t respond. I tried the window again and it gave just enough. My long unused aluminum cane was in arm’s reach.  I wedged the rubbered end of it between the sill and the bottom of the window. I pushed down and the 45-degree angle eased the window up and open.  My nostrils pulsed. I breathed long and deep.

I wondered what the boy would think if he could see through the wall.  If he wondered why I didn’t rake my own leaves. If he wondered why he rarely saw me except through my window. He would walk and run and skip and jump up the back walkway Monday through Friday after school ended. A polite boy. A caring boy. He always waved and I did too. My eyesight hadn’t failed and I could always see him glance to the left at the wooden planks that anchored themselves at varying angles up to the back door.  A child would fancy a sleek chromed chair with two large wheels on either side, a thing for adventure, for daring. I imagined he saw himself racing in my chair down the two-tired ramp a smile crowing his achievement, an imaginary trophy in his empty hand.  Aren’t all achievements forgotten? Don’t we just relish those that happen in the moment? An ephemeral victory.  The boy couldn’t know and will never know my achievement was opening my window today.

I closed my eyes and could still see his small frame moving like a miniature grandfather clock. How did God figure into making things move? The boy, the leaves, the air we breathe? The muscle to move the rake, the smile that begged for something, a hand thrust upward moving back and forth, back and forth… An ache in the throat, a tear in the ear, a sound through an empty house to an empty kitchen. He made these things move and he made things unmovable. Legs. Arms. Hearts. Movement is sacred, and I have sinned.