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.