Home

While I have some free time, and I'm kind of ruminating on the thought/idea of home without being homesick, I figured I'd kill some time and describe it to you.

No, home isn't the house I live in. I've never lived there. It's the house on Jackson Hill, on Highway 7, leaving Joaquin and going toward Center. It's an old brick house that my great-grandparents lived in.
The driveway is sloped at a terrifying angle (or so I think. I always have trouble backing out of it without hitting the Pampas Grass on either side of it), and leads up to a garage with a chipped support in the front. My mother nicked it with the back of the old Oldsmobile that used to be parked there. (Pretty sure she doesn't want that bit told.) If you knock on the front door instead of the side door, everyone inside jokes about you and talks about how you haven't ever been there before. That screened in porch is where Paw-Paw's dogs stayed a good deal of the time. Through that front door with the broken pane, the first thing you see is the massive fireplace that's just the right height to sit on when there's not a fire in it. I've never been around a fireplace that heated that well. Take a few steps in and look to the left. There's that door that no one that knows anything about the house knocks on. Another step and there's the window that Grandma used to feed birds at. The cardinals and hummingbirds still fly by there, even though I can't remember the last time there was any seed in the feeder.

Walk up to the fireplace and see the clock that I've seen my Paw-Paw wind a thousand times if I've seen it once. Take a right into the dining room. I've spent countless holidays in this dining room, picking at the most amazing food I've ever had, and some of the least impressive as well... But definitely more good food, mountains more, than bad. I've talked about everything from school work to boyfriends to visiting relatives in this room. Out the window, you can see the gardenia bush(? Tree? Shrub?). Those white flowers are possibly my favorite in the world. The waxy petals and cloyingly sweet smell never fail to take me to that hill, regardless of where my feet are actually planted.

From that window in the dining room, go straight to that thick back door to the porch, where I 'learned to smoke' by sitting on those concrete steps while the older relatives had cigarettes, or in Uncle Arnold's case, at least, a cigar or two. I used to nap in that porch swing while Momma took care of Grandma. I've read so many library books on that painted swing. It got that coat of (now peeling) paint years ago. I think that Tori and I may have painted it actually. if memory serves, my cousin Joy (whose endeavor I think it was) painted the railing to the front door, and Ashley painted the ironwork on the front porch. Then again, it was years ago, and I hardly paid it much attention.

Back through the back door, down the hall on the left. The front bathroom, then the bedroom on the right, where Grandpa stayed when he was sick. Where Grandma stayed when she was sick. Where Paw-Paw sleeps now when he's there, with the bookshelf packed with paperback westerns right inside the door. Back down the hall some more. The back bathroom with the blue wallpaper. The huge hall closet that at one point had a porch light in it to illuminate the depths of it. Then down the steps to the back bedroom.

I never lived here in the sense that I slept there routinely, but it's home.

Jolie Holland's music takes me there, just like the smell of gardenia or the sound of crickets or a good sunset. 

Well, time to run.