Blog 40 Home (Gary)

  I have decided today to stay at “home” and spend most of my time in the back yard.  I have watched the ants, played with my dog, had my wife take a couple pictures of me for an application, helped her bathe her dog, cooked a fresh organic vegetable dish for myself, read, worked for ten minutes in the yard, and I am now laying in the sun with my shirt off writing this. 

            I observe that I am not waiting for anything nor am I anxious to do something.  I am not missing anything nor forgetting something I "should" be doing.  I am at home.  My mind is blank and that is okay.  Am I home yet?  I don't know.  Let me just "sit a spell," as they said in the old west.

            Sadly this isn't Essie and Alan's.  My mother used to board me with them during the week because of her work.  They had a wonderful place with more of a country feel.  It was about four acres with apple trees and a swing between two giant redwoods, a dog, and great cooking.  I fondly remember the after-school date nut bread and the tapioca pudding, the essence of which I cannot put on the page.  Yes, I feel the sadness. 

            The part I didn’t want to write was that they initially scared me with their fights over Alan’s drinking.  I had nightmares and developed a stutter.  I remember Essie finding a bottle of Four Roses bourbon under my mattress.  Then one day all the fighting and drinking stopped.  I am grateful.  God knows what I would have been like if that had continued.

            Now I am really sad.  I remember digging a hole in the ground there just to see what I could find.  It was my hole and my sacred adventure no one else knew.  I also found interesting old stuff in their old burn pile.  Why do I cry about that?  I have to guess it's because I felt I had something that was mine and in my aloneness I found cool things to do and adventures I could create.  I no longer have that.  Was it a sense of home?  Can I create it here?  Maybe what I most miss is allowing that kid the freedom to adventure. 

            I have to recognize that The Hill is a large part for my child.  My fantasy of bushwhacking through the brush and sitting under a tree no one else can reach, or has even considered getting to from the trail, really appeals to me.  I often look off the trail and toy with my desire to cross the high brush to get to an old tree at the top of a hill, to a place where, maybe, no one has ever ventured.  Maybe there will be a relic from the past there: a mountain lion’s lair; a drug dealer’s pot farm; the skeleton of an ancient mountain man.

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