Question – what is home to you?

What is home?  My little boy says it is ‘the place where we live’, which I was pretty impressed by.  But for me, in my unsettled mind, this place, where we have lived for only six months is not yet home.  When I step beyond my house, are these streets home?  How many times do I have to walk down them before they become part of me?  Is home the repetition of experiencing the same place for a length of time until it is embedded somewhere in my memory?   If so, how long will it take?  What is the tipping point when the place where we physically reside becomes the place that we emotionally consider home?

I long for the feeling of home.  Home is my Mother’s kitchen, covered with sepia-toned newsprint wallpaper and orange tiles.  Home is the sweet, toasty smell of her apple pie baking in the oven.  But Mother is not in her kitchen now and I am not a time traveller.

And so, I seek home in the here and now.  And in this endeavour I reach out to ask – what is home to you?

 

 

 

 

Look Now

It is the fifth instance of the third month of the year two thousand and nineteen, or so they say.  Measures of time bemuse me.  Sometimes it feels like I am living in many times simultaneously as my roguish mind is wont to wander.  It ruminates upon tannin-rich memories, swilling them around my head, clouding my days with powdery sediment.  The past is too real, it intrudes upon my present too frequently, too vividly.  My body lives through it, over and over again.

Plain sight eludes me.  I search feverishly through a tangle of words spoken and deeds done long ago, for safe passage through the unknown.  Although, on occasion, I hear the faint voice of a found woman.  She calls to me everyday but the noise, the before and the to come, pound on the side of my skull till I cannot hear her any longer.  But, today, she emerges from a dusty blackness.  A solid, whole being of curved flesh, peppered hair and weathered face sits before me.  Her back is straight.   She opens her hands and holds my cold fingers in her warm, rough skin and her firmness, her truth cradles my entire being.  She fixes me with her level gaze that sees the essence of me and she says: ‘Don’t look back.  Don’t look forward. Look now.  I dare you.’

And she is gone.

 

 

Missing

 

Friday 1st March 2019

‘I miss you Mummy.’  I told her how I felt and I wept.

She told me: ‘Don’t think of anything except me loving you.’