Can you go home or not?
Some say no. I go home all the time. I don’t mean to the Landfill. I mean, I do go home to the Landfill all the time but I also go back to Yooperland pretty darn frequently. What the heck? On a good day with a reliable vee-hickle and dry pavement and minimal traffic and one gas/bathroom stop, it can be done in four hours and forty minutes. And what is home anyway? My parents moved out of our house on the South Side after I went to college. Grandma Margaret died that year and they moved into her house. And that house wasn’t even her *real* house. Her *real* house was five or six blocks away from my house on the South Side. I can remember when we would drive a big ladder back and forth to and from Grandberry and Grandma’s house there. The Commander would drive and Grandroobly would hang out the passenger-side window holding onto the ladder. You’d prob’ly get arrested for that nowadays. Anyway, the house The Commander lives in now was once my first (and wonderful) piano teacher’s house. Mrs. Diecke (spelling, anyone?). Mrs. Commander’s computer/sewing room was where I waited for the student ahead of me to finish with his/her lesson so I could have mine. The Comm’s puano is right where Mrs. Diecke’s was.
I don’t know who lives in my house on Superior Street any more. I only haunt the South Side in the winter. In the summer, I hang a left onto M28 and hit Piche Side Road and go straight to the beach. The heck with the South Side. But in the winter of the last few years, when the beach turns into a tundra, I have been haunting the South Side when I have the chance. I want to take pictures but it’s hard. I feel like a time traveler and I don’t really want to invade people’s privacy. And I’m not good at photographing buildings anyway, so…
Prob’ly the craziest time-warpiest thing was last April. I was walking right in front of my old house. I was talking on my iPhone to my cuzzint NPJane, who was down here on the Planet, checking out the damage from the tree that had fallen on the Landfill the day before. A resident of the neighborhood spotted me and asked me if I was okay. Probably wondering what dimension I was from. I was unnerved. I wish I had told her that I was just looking at my old house. And school. And neighborhood. I am such a social klutz! Alas, she’d’ve prob’ly invited me in for tea and cookies. The slideshow today has nothing to do with the South Side of Siberia. Totally the other side of town. But click here or on the pic anyway. It’s another early morning walk up in the land of the ice and snow.
Can you go home or not? Or do you live at home? Or what?
Love y’all, KW
Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset…
February 17th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Interesting question. Where is home? For all of the Courtois sibs is it the Woodsboro house in Royal Oak? We can do a “drive by”, but we can’t really stop there. (Actually, i guess we could, but I would feel silly.) Is it where each of us lay our head at night? Maybe Houghton Lake? I guess our “home” now would be where we each live, but I don’t feel I have any other home to go to. I’m glad that you can go home, Anne. I am glad that the Commander is there to greet you, too. Sometimes I wish I could go home.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
I realized in college that my “center” was at the cabin. Of course my parents moved to a new house just as I started college, so my childhood home wasn’t around. My kids see Seattle as home, so I suppose I will have to start thinking that way sometime soon too.
February 18th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I think several geographic locales have homishness to me. The deepest emotional connection is to OUR cottage and the central UP, although other places do have resonance.
February 19th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Grandma Margaret–oh, dear. I’m used to most of the people who share my name being several decades older though! (got used to it when I was a teenager) I am close to where I grew up, about 2 minutes from my parents. So, I am part of the history of the area, which has pluses and minuses.