Where's Home?

Watching the advice of the dearly departed on “Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead” Andy the Saint says “make a list.” A list, he says, of ten things you want to do in your life and if you cross off five or six you’re doing good.

Someone I know posted a picture of a house in the middle of the woods and ferns. A red house like the red house we lived in the first house they bought. Small but enough. This is the house you want to live in. This is the house you want to die in. This is the house that feels like a life-long afternoon nap.

I am thinking number one and number ten on the list are “find home.” Home, I think, is not a locus. Maybe for some people home is a locus.

“Where are you from?”

If you have a ready answer to this question perhaps your home has a locus.

I have a collage. Floating as a child on an inflated mattress in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Maui. Riding horses in the 4-H parade and sleeping outside in the summer on the farm playing cowgirl for a day. Rowing the dinghy wherever we anchored the boat and checking crab pots. Sleeping on the couch in Oakland and waking to the sound of my cousins as toddlers. Sun Valley in the Spring. The Puget Sound after midnight.

I am thinking lately, the answer to numbers one and ten is a live-on boat.

Where is home? Is it a feeling? Is it the place you want to be buried? Is it a person or a group of people? Is it the place you came into the world? The place you’ve remained the longest? How is anyone from one place? How? Is it simply the place you want to return to when you’re somewhere else? Is it the place you think of for comfort falling asleep?

This is turning into that Abbott and Costello skit, “Who’s on first?” only who’s home, what’s home, why’s it home, today’s home, tomorrow’s home and oh, I don’t know.