Home

Home wasn't confined to the simple pink frame house on Newton street. It extended into the backyard and even beyond into the forest and wilds of the corn rows and strawberry patches of the bordering nursery. A huge mountain of discarded potted plants, carnations and gerraniums mostly, made a heroic climb from the time I was 5 or 6 years old. The willow tree that grew in the back yard was more my private space than the bedroom whose floor was so lovingly carpeted by my mother with discarded carpet scraps carefully trimmed and glued together.

We were poor, but I never knew it. I never knew that most people didn't work two jobs like my mother and grandmother. I never knew that most people didn't pay the debts of last Christmas in October before charging again, or that waiting a year for new shoes wasn't the norm.

I was a latch key kid, before doors were locked, and before there was a name for it, so that home began to expand into unfamiliar neighborhoods, and places. The acreage and woods called Elfindale when it was still wild, and full of the wildlife I called friends; the deserted rock quarry past the railroad tracks, with it's paths and bluffs and cliffs; the creeks where I swam. These were home, as surely as my own quilt thrown beneath the willow tree of my childhood.

Home was the formica table where beans and cornbread were a mainstay. Home was the recliner that met my grandmother's weary groan at the day's end. It was the picture window whose curtains were closed only in winter to slow the brutal draft, and the trees sheathed in ice that chimed above in the wind.  All these were home. I can't hear, or read the word without returning.