Home is where...

Yeah I walked down that road, past the llamas and the mountain of briar that, come August, glistens with sweet berries you can’t get to without thorny entanglement. Did you know it ends with two boulders sunk into the muddy gravel? If you can climb over, there’s a meadow akin to faeryland; nothing dead there, the stones moss-covered, even the old hedgerow sprouting green suckers. And by some perverse whimsy the trees are shaped like question marks, one trunk even warped into a helix. There were stone circles, not those old megaliths, these could be arranged by four hands. Thinking it an old homestead, I searched for any sign of building foundations. Which caused me wonder;
When I was seventeen my father invited me to his fortieth high school reunion. We tag-teamed a steering wheel three days, arriving at that little town near sundown. In the backroom of some fraternal order a few stout, sunburned graybeards clasped hands and swapped stories and allowed me to watch. One guy even gave me a pool cue and a longneck, to amuse myself in case the proceedings became too arcane. Early next morning, after some worst-tasting coffee, father drove dirt roads, then turned off across a stretch of prairie grass, stopping on a hill. “This is it” was all he said. A heap of rotted timbers was what was left of the house in which grandmother bore and nursed him, where grandfather taught him to plait and rig harness. Their riverine bottomland was now under a lake backed up behind a dam built in a neighboring state. I said nothing. Just the look on his face spoke. He picked up a rock, and we drove three days back to a different home.
Maybe thirty years after my father’s death, I found in an old suitcase a rock smudged with ink. Maybe a name and date, but I couldn’t see it clearly.

• Favorite
• Report Concern
• Share This
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Add your comment

You need to login or signup to add your comment to this work.