Home is a Place
I wrote the poem below in early 2020, before the pandemic hit. I was sitting in my car outside a laundromat in Lubbock, Texas, waiting for my clothes to finish drying. While sitting there staring at my dashboard, I suddenly became very deeply aware that I was a long way from home.
For some, home is just as much place as it is people. I spent more time with trees than humans when I was a kid, which should explain at least some of my many quirks. When I return to my hardwood forests I feel a sense of comfort and connection that I feel in few other places, and in fewer people. I know those trees, and they know me.
The realization that I was a long way from home had little to do with physical distance and more to do with the foreignness of the landscape in which I found myself, and find myself still. Flat, no trees, little water, blowing dirt. Wild blowing dirt. It was the realization that I no longer spoke the language of the land. I couldn’t connect.
My relationship with West Texas has been complex. When I first moved here, I researched the plants, the lizards that frequently appear inside my house, the birds, the snakes, the spiders that spin their webs in my window sills and in the dark corners of my studio. Fifteen years later, I still do this when I encounter a wildflower or shrub or insect I don’t recognize (and now there are really cool apps to help with that, like Seek and Merlin Bird ID). How can I live on a piece of earth I don’t know or understand? How can I walk by these things day after day and not know their names? It’s a powerful thing to know your neighbors by name. Suddenly they’re no longer strangers but important parts of your life that carry the weight of intention… of care and love.
I have often said home is a place. The face value of the phrase contradicts most people’s experiences these days, but I mean for it to reflect a bigger picture. Our home is the earth. The earth—land, water, sky—is place. If we could see the blowing dirt and vanishing water as home, maybe we could live with more intention toward it. Care for it. Love it, even.
Black ink on white napkin, I sit in my car and write outside a laundromat in town a love poem to a place hundreds of miles of well-traveled road from here. Flash of light on the dashboard. I am a long way from home. How many love poems can one pen to the same piece of earth? How many love poems can one pen to the same piece of earth? Ask me in another four decades, if I’m still alive. I’ll still be writing them — heart full of rock and soil.