And another one.
Picture #5.
More Than Money
We’d been in that house twenty-five years on our anniversary. Our parents bought it for us as a wedding present. How they did it we didn’t know, but it gave us the freedom to build our lives up without the worry of a mortgage. Calvin earned his accounting degree in night school at that table. Only after twenty-five years, did we realize that the house had come with a mortgage. With every child’s birth, every graduation, every marriage, we were putting more of our hearts into our home. It wasn’t a mortgage paid with money, it was paid with love.
Home
The aeroplane unfurls its door into stairs with the magic inherent in coming home. The heavy tropical air waits patiently outside, warming the chill off the metal tube, and arranging a welcoming bouquet.
Humidity threatens, but never truly makes good, defeated at each turn by an ocean that's never very far. Salt breezes come in from the north, riding the sussurus of the waves. They meet and mix with the slow sounds and smells of the city, food and smoke and animals. Music binds it all together.
In Jamaica someone is always smiling, and a radio is always on.
(Better now. I just wish I'd understood that I was primarily having a blood sugar freakout and started out by getting something to eat instead of publicly panicking over stupid shit first.)
I just wish I'd understood that I was primarily having a blood sugar freakout
You didn't sign any documents, you didn't sell Annabel to Gypsies, you didn't lob heavy objects at passing strangers, you didn't give your credit card information to somebody on the phone. It's cool.
Ouch. Writing muscles creaky. Pared it way down, ran way over anyway. Not terribly fond of it, but if I don't start somewhere I'll never start writing again at all. Home.
The summer house used to sit alone at the edge of the Keys in a wilderness of weeds and wildflowers and grasshoppers snapping up into your face all summer long, glittering snowdrifts all winter: a ten-minute bike ride into town. Now it’s boxed in by condos, a 25-minute drive from the woods.
Even so hemmed in, the grasshoppers snap up all summer; the snow glares you blind all winter. Inside are Disney books and ragtime records, decades-old menus and birthday cards, a college portrait of the flowerchild who became my mournful Christian aunt, a Little Mermaid from Copenhagen. Outside are the plants at the waterline, thriving on Mem’s ashes. Outside is where Jack’s ashes will soon join hers.
No one lives here. We all live here.
Steph, have you read our stuff so far? Yea, but the definition of maudlin is inherent in the topic. It's a place we all long for, but can't go back to. Yet, we all have one whether we admit it or not. One thing moving around so much with the military taught me (and this may only be true for me) is that home is wherever I am. Like a turtle shell, I carry it with me.
...home is wherever I am. Like a turtle shell, I carry it with me.
I missed Steph's post, but you're not the only one to feel that way, Sail. My family wasn't military, but I lived in twelve different locations before I left to go to college at 18, and I've lived in six others since.
