Home
I can go there anytime . . . .
by Elizabeth Eugenia (James) LaBozetta
By no small coincidence, every place I have known as "home" while growing up has been torn down. My homes were razed for various reasons: a four-lane highway was built through the property of one, another sat unsteady on a sandstone foundation shaken loose by too many spring floods and was ravaged to the rooftop by termites. My first home, a log cabin, was removed from its original site in a farmer's cow pasture and relocated to a place of honor—a group of people who take an interest in preserving such relics of Ohio history bought it, took it apart and cataloged each piece down to the last shingle, hauled it away, and rebuilt it to its original estate. "Home" is now called "museum". I call it "museum" too; when the cabin left its original site it ceased the title "home".
The first home I can remember in greatest detail was my second home in fact, the home of my paternal grandparents. It sat one in a row of a dozen identical company houses owned by the brick factory directly across the street. These small, white-sided squares were torn down all at once but for one at the end of the strip. Now, that last one is gone too and so is the brick factory. I am left without landmarks for finding my way back to childhood, left without visual proof that I had existed as a child at all. Yet, I often return to these homes and find them standing exactly as they were when I'd last seen them with my natural eyes.
It is strange to remember in vivid detail, places that no longer exist. My mind's eye has captured forever the image of a linoleum rug I had played upon many times at the age of three; using wooden clothespins as people I'd dance them, whirling, across the gray fern-and-feather pattern set onto a deep red background. The plumes became gray islands then; the red background the sea. That rug has been gone 55 years now yet my mind's eye preserves its image as clearly as if I had seen it again only yesterday.
In the house with the gray-plume rug my Grandmother sits at the kitchen table sipping sugar- sweetened tea from a green and pink floral cup. The matching china teapot, filled with hot water and containing a teaball packed with Green Young Hysson leaves, steeps across the room on the back burner of an unlit cook stove. The faint aroma of bottle-gas hangs lightly in the air of the kitchen mixed evenly with the scent of tea and sulfur from the coal we burn to keep warm. A light coating of coal dust covers everything inside our home and out, stains the snow of winter to a drab gray. I am restless and want to go outdoors to play in the snow.
My grandmother wears the dress I love best, the only one I can remember. It is navy blue with a yellow windowpane pattern set in identical rows striped the length of the fabric--four perfect squares stacked two-on-two. How I loved that dress, loved the grandmother wearing it; she resembled a skyscraper towering above me, the windows lit from within, shining clear yellow out into a navy blue night.
Around her necks dangles the locket, a gift from her son, my father. The locket is shaped like a heart, gold with a pearlescent face. Set off-center is a single blue gemstone. I am holding the hem of her dress in my hands, squinting into the yellow-lit windows of the skyscraper hoping to catch a glimpse of the world surely contained inside when Grandma lifts me to her lap, holds the locket to my right eye and says: "Close your other eye and look deeply into the blue gemstone". I do as she says and am delighted to find words inside, laid deep somehow: "The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want" from the 23rd Psalm of the Bible, enclosed inside the stone somehow and kept safely there to be read when needed. It seemed a miracle that all those words could be placed into a blue stone so small, another miracle that I am able to return to this place and time 55 years later to again view what no longer exists in the present: a gray plume rug, a skyscraper dress, a dearly- loved grandmother wearing a locket of blue, gold, and pearl.
When returning to this home, to any of them really, I do not always enter by way of the kitchen but through the door waiting opened for me by whatever trigger that causes a sudden yank from my place in the present: the scent of bottle-gas in any other place, the taste of Green Young Hysson tea in my own kitchen where I am now the cook. I travel on memories, return by roads forged long ago by my senses, enter through doors made only for me. Nothing ever changes; I am always welcome; there is all the time in the world. My grandmother's Blue Willow dishes are stacked neatly on the shelves in her kitchen cupboard, the salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like pigs are in their usual place on the windowsill. "Casey Jones", "Hop-A-Long Cassidy", "Sheba, Queen Of The Jungle" and "Queen For a Day" play after each other on the black-and-white television. I am truly home.
In returning to the home I loved best and longest, entry comes always by way of my bedroom. I had nine years of white dogwood flowers set against a pink sky patterned into the wallpaper; nine years of the ancient ceiling light fixture shaped like the pedals of water lilies at the sockets meant to hold bare light bulbs. I had nine years of the view of two windows. I thought this room to be set at the place two countries met, two entirely different worlds converged: one window looked out onto a pastoral scene; the river and railroad could be seen past this sill and beyond the river's edge hills rose heavily wooded in trees of many kinds and textures. In spring the woodland would flower in white, yellow, and pink between the feathery-green slashes of pine. Late spring brought the first bright, new green that summer would gradually harden to the deep gray-green of August. Autumn brought vibrant reds, golds, and oranges. Leaves would fall in bright bursts according to the mood of the wind, bringing into the open windows of my bedroom the smoke scent of bonfires and the soft rattle of corn drying on the stalks in the dying fields. I watched all of this from my place at the sill of the window that looked out onto peace and tranquility, faithfully, year after year, never suspecting this world as I knew it would not go on forever.
For many nights I sat at this sill to watch the mist rise off the nearby river, drawn upward by the increasing chill, to inch its way slowly toward the sleeping town. It would rise and creep silently, slipping across the railroad tracks to softly finger its way up the side walls of the houses in its path. When the mist reached my own home I'd step out my window onto the roof of the kitchen below to get a better view of the slow, laborious climb to where I sat waiting. The sounds of trains passing in the night, with the squeal of wheel against rail and the rhythmic clack-clack of its passing made me long for travel and the view of another window.
The second window looked out onto a busy street, a state highway linking cities. There was a constant flow of large trucks hauling all manner of merchandise; summer brought vacationers through town on their way to nearby lakes for boating and fishing. Traffic swished by day and night. Across the street hummed a busy lumberyard with muffled shrieks of saw blade against green wood, hammering, and the shouts of workmen to one another, The name of this lumber company had been cleverly laid out in light and dark roofing shingles on the long expanse of the storage shed. I had the only clear view of these words save for the occasional airplane passing overhead: "Nelsonville Lumber".
A horse was kept at one end of the storage shed to pull loads of cut wood from one end of the complex to the other. I learned of the existence of this magnificent animal by accident: on a pre-dawn morning of summer I sat in my usual place at the sill to watch traffic pass in the heavy fog left by the river's work of the night. The headlights of cars passing by appeared as muted balls of light, without body or substance, and the eerie scene fascinated me so on I sat, watching. Out of the fog rose the horse—a white, thick-bodied draft animal dressed in full harness. It appeared to move in slow motion, an illusion created in part by the fog, dragging heavy leather straps intended to attach to a cart. Clumsily clinging to the wide leather yoke circling the horse's neck sat a farmer dressed in bib overalls, unshaven, with a denim work hat on top his head—bouncing hard with each step of the horse. The man paused the horse in the yard below my window, looked up to where I sat watching, saluted me with one quick flip of his hand, then disappeared into the fog. It all happened so fast and was of such magic that moments later I could not be certain it had happened at all. Later in the morning, after the sun came out and woke the rest of the household for breakfast and a new day, I looked at the lawn below my window to find large horseshoe prints pressed deep in the dirt. Horse and rider are long dead but my mind's eye has preserved both in time, fixed forever in the fog of a morning that will never come again, in view from a window that no longer exists.
"Home" is much more than an actual place. I keep my home as a state of mind, a fine network of feelings, impressions, and memories collected over a lifetime. The things most important to me have been preserved in exquisite detail, to be taken out for examination whenever the need of them comes--like the Lord's Prayer set into a gemstone on a locket.
I return home whenever I hear a train horn slicing the night, smell the acrid scent of leaves burning in autumn, then my mind's eye peers into the gemstone.
