Home

 

Driving down 101 all afternoon, the sun filtered by thin clouds, clung to the upper edge of my windshield. I was impatient to be done driving and pushing past the upper limit of reasonable and prudent. The road dipped and curved, in and out of the shadowing firs, the light suddenly cut off and I’m driving blind,  flipping up the visor for more sight only to cut a curve and be back in the glare. Slap the visor back down.

I was heading back down the South Coast after a morning of doctor appointments. Thoroughly poked, prodded, and twice injected, I just wanted to be home.

For the last hour of the trip the 101 broke out of the trees and followed the beach more closely. The high, grey overcast increased, a fog set in. The pale sun reflected from the ocean on one side and the ponds and bays on the other. It was an Oregon coast version of a white out. The change in moisture made my windshield fog. It increased my annoyance, it did not reduce my speed. I just wanted to be home.

Just now, home was an RV on the southern Oregon coast and would be for another six weeks. It was home because that was where Lydia was. I had spent the previous evening at our house in the Willamette Valley, picking up mail, dropping off unneeded clothes and a broken camera. Josh was working, and I joined him for a dinner out after he was through. During the afternoon the empty house unnerved me. I think it was knowing that, for a while at least, this was our house, our home was someplace else.

 

The idea of home interests me, maybe because I have had many. My parents moved us often while we lived in Wyoming. We lived in six different houses before I graduated high school. Leaving me in Oregon for college, our next move, they went on to Montana then to Washington, where they moved many more times. Looking back, only Wyoming, as a whole, resonates home to me. I have vague, comfortable memories of friends and events in each of the neighborhoods we lived in, but not of any house. Home was where my parents and my sisters lived, at least until the arguments started, the yelling and door slamming. Then I only wanted out. Home became a concept, not a reality.

Home Sweet Home. There’s no place like home. My home is over Jordan. “You can’t go home again.” (Thomas Wolfe) “My Old Kentucky Home”. “Home on the Range”. Home is about safety, comfort, security, and emotional as well as physical shelter. It is more about longing than reality. It is the place where life is good.

For a long time, Wyoming was home, although I no longer lived there. The wide blue skies, sagebrush scent blown in from the prairie, glare from the sun off a foot of new snow, staked a place in my being and I found it difficult to replace it. Then I met Lydia and Oregon became home. Long grey days and the smell of rhododendron found their place. (I became a pluviophile.)

Years later, I know that home is not a particular place. It is a Zen koan. I can sit and close my eyes, lose my thoughts, and be where home is now.  Thomas Wolfe was right of course, “you can’t go home again” because home changes and is never how it was, but that’s not so bad. (I recall folks at a recent high school reunion who had not changed since high school. I felt sad for them.) Home is the place I find when I close my eyes.

 Oregon is home only so far as it is the background in which I am sustained and supported, nurtured and loved.  So, it is that, like a caffeine crazed Dean Moriarity, I speed down Hwy.101, until I see the sign for Turtle Rock.

I brake and make the turn.

Home.