You Can Go Home Again - to the Bookstore

Earlier this month, I went to a place I hadn’t been in more than a year. 

A bookstore.

 

I had an appointment at the Apple Store at the mall. The goal was to fix the battery drain on my wife’s iPhone after the most recent operating system update. Apple has its store procedures down to a fine art. Make an appointment, arrive a few minutes early to get your temperature taken, stand where designated outside the store until a rep checks you in, stand where designated in the checked-in line, and then a rep comes and gets you for your appointment. In this case, he diagnosed the problem and offered a solution (reset the phone). 

 

I had to make another appointment for the fix. Fortunately, it was for only 90 minutes later. I had some time. And I succumbed to the siren’s call of the mall’s Barnes & Noble store. I hadn’t been in a bookstore since pre-pandemic times, but I was more than two weeks past my second vaccination shot, I was wearing my mask, and I was expert in maintaining social distancing (and giving the evil eye to others who weren’t).

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Mark Burrows and “The Chance for Home”

In 2013, my mother moved to a retirement home, leaving the house she had lived in for 58 years. It was a house like they used to be built – with window sills, plaster walls, and overhanging eaves. She cared for that home like you would care for a child, and it was in incredibly good shape when it was sold. 

This was the place all three of her sons thought of as “home.” It was more than a physical structure. It was family. It was comedy and drama. It was experiences. It remains memory. 

As I read The Chance for Home, the new collection of poetry by Mark Burrows, I was struck with wonder. Flat-out wonder. Burrows writes poetry with a sense of stillness and a sense of silence; it takes both, perhaps, to understand the things that are ultimately important in life and about a life.

And he writes about home, or at least the chance for home. And he has a different understanding of what “home” is.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

A strange home

After Psalm 91

This is a home, I’m told;

a dwelling, a place to live

and abide, and yet one

of the strangest houses

I’ve encountered.

No walls, no windows, no door,

roofless, no systems to heat

or cool, and yet I walk

room to room without

encountering a single wall

or divider, and yet I know

when rooms change. Perhaps

the oddest aspect of this

odd dwelling is the sense

of security provided

by a shadow.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Returning home

Once I had to return home

but the door was locked,

the house for sale and a stranger

had to be called to open the door

with a new key. The cypress tree

by the driveway had been cut

down when I was a child; the one

in the front yard survived

the subdivision until its branches

tangled the power lines during

a hurricane. But the impression

in the yard is still there, though,

right where the stump was,

suggesting an eventual subsidence

into original swamp.

Photograph by Yagan Z Dongobar via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

How Many Homes Have You Lived In?

To answer the question for myself, I rely on the memory of my mother, because the first three places I lived I don’t remember – two rental homes in New Orleans and one in Florida. I can remember the duplex we lived in until I was four, almost five, when my parents bought the home I consider the one I grew up in.

Then there were the three places I lived in college (dorm, fraternity house, apartment); my first apartment on my own in Texas, quickly followed by our first apartment as newlyweds; two apartments and a townhome in Houston; and then an apartment and two homes in St. Louis.

That made 16 places. I thought I had it figured out. Then I remembered the hotel room I lived in for six weeks when I first came to Houston and my wife was still in Houston; does that count? So I thought, OK, that was longer than just a few days, so maybe that would make 17.

Oh, yeah, there was also the summer we were homeless. I’d forgotten about that.

In 1986, we were building what is now our current home. We had never built a home before. Based on that experience, it will take a lot for me to even consider building a home again (a sentiment my wife thinks is slightly ridiculous but I could tell you some stories).

We had finally sold our existing home. The problem was that we had to move out in early June, and the new house wouldn’t be ready until late August. We talked to friends, and friends of friends, and people at church, and put the word out that we could house sit. We landed two house-sitting places and with some judicious timing of vacations at our parents’ homes in Louisiana, a friend’s basement for storing my books, the moving company’s warehouse for our furniture and household effects and a storage locker for things like lawn mowers, we did it. In retrospect, we had to be nuts.

We spent our first night out of our old house at our pastor’s house. What I remember most was driving there in a pouring rain. Then we spent three weeks at a home in a rather upscale part of St. Louis called Ladue (known as “Lah-Due” locally) while the owners chaperoned a bunch of high school kids on a trip to Europe. They also had a dog, two cats, a bird and six beehives. The dog was sweet but spacey, and loved to slip out the door to visit the beehives. The bees were not sweet and very focused/protective. One Saturday my wife looked out the back door to see me and our then-six-year-old looking like we were beating the dog, who was writhing on the ground. I suppose we were – but we were trying to kills the bees that had swarmed after him after he disturbed one of the hives.

A vacation to Louisiana, and then we were back to a new house-sitting place, a small home in another upscale section of St. Louis called Clayton. The owner was spending a month in Japan and China. We had no pets to worry about this time, the owner also didn’t stop her mail, so that I was able to read her New York Times Sunday Book Review for several Sundays in a row on her front porch swing.

Finally, we were approaching the time for our house to be finished. We closed on a Monday. The Friday before, I happened to mention this to the builder supervising the construction. His eyes grew large. He checked the contract. “Can you put it moving in off for a few days?” he asked. “Only if you pay to put us up somewhere, or have a couple of spare bedrooms yourself,” I said. Yes, the builder was behind schedule. The movers were coming on Tuesday to deliver our furniture, and a furniture company would be delivering a new sideboard for the dining room. The builder panicked and started shouting orders at the workmen.

We did close on the house that Monday. And we did move in on Tuesday. We had no driveway, no front porch, no back patio, a yard of good Missouri clay, and several dozens of other uncompleted things, but we did move in. We were home.

To see more posts on “home,” please visit the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock.

Top photograph: “Home” in New Orleans. Bottom photograph: “Home” in St. Louis.