HOME SWEET HOME

Coming home, something about the idea of coming home that makes people feel, one way or another. Home for me was where my family lived when I was a child. By today’s standards, my youth was wild, unstructured and unsupervised. They had some idea of where I was and who I was with but I marched pretty much to my own drum. There was a surplus of love and respect but you had to entertain yourself and you had the latitude to follow your own compass. People can’t do that now, it would make parents guilty of neglect or worse. Home was more than just a house on a road, it was the center of my orb; family, friends, bicycle, music, baseball and more. That’s where I went when I was tired or hungry, when I was out of money. When I joined the army the Frankosphere expanded rapidly. Duty assignments took me to Arkansas, North Carolina, the far East and then I came home, whatever that meant. But things change and so did I. I lived with my parents but it wasn’t home anymore. Home had been a place in time and times had changed. It felt more like a new assignment than coming home. That’s the story of my life. 

When you retire, powers that be require you to have a home address, where you can receive mail and be scrutinized. Over the years, across the jobs, I learned how the world works; gravity, photosynthesis, the speed of light, systems and energy budgets. I realized that ‘Home’ is the tiny blue boat, floating in a stellar abyss. I live there with over seven billion of my relatives, and I resist the urge to 'Tribalize'. I am an American citizen but I can’t take credit for that. Life there has been good too me and mine and I have no reason to change but it’s just a way of organizing more people than the planet was meant to sustain. Seems to be comforting to discriminate between us and them and to take sides if you must but that path goes in circles, repeating the same mistakes again and again.

So now, looking back, where do you go when you go home? I was trying to be clever recently and spoke up, “Home is where the feet is.” If I have friends and good memories there, then I'm at home. Right now I’m at home in Michigan, with my clothes in the closet and my car parked by the barn. This is where the government sends my mail but I’m only here a few weeks, several times a year. We are in our second year of establishing a blueberry patch. With about 2500 plants in the ground and 7000 to go, it will take several years. Those pesky little whips from last fall are bearing fruit already. The new babies are well rooted in their gallon containers, so anxious to live and bear fruit that they can’t contain themselves. They won’t be planted for couple of months but most of them have a few juicy berries, begging to be picked. If I don’t get them the deer will. I feel right at home. Next month I will be making sawdust in the basement work shop of a house I own in Missouri. I’ll take photographs of my grandchildren playing soccer and I’ll feel right at home. The month after that, I’ll be with my daughter, rafting down the Grand Canyon; we will sleep on beaches I’ve slept on before, I’ll tell her about the last time I was there, and the time before that when we were up on the rim together, and I’ll be right at home. Home, ". . . that mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”