Being Home

Description

Being Home is a collection of personal essays about the spirit of place, the juncture of memory and emotions. It is different for everyone; it is different for members of the same family, and it most likely has nothing to do with where you were born or grew up. Award-winning essayists Sam Pickering and Bob Kunzinger selected the essays for this collection, selecting essays about being home where setting becomes character, where time becomes the antagonist, and where we make our most important discoveries.

Sujets

• Special Interest
• Literary
• Travel

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692632
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Being Home
An Anthology
Being Home
An Anthology
Edited by Sam Pickering &Bob Kunzinger
Copyright © 2021
by Sam Pickering & Bob Kunzinger, editors
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
P.O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Cover Design: Jacqueline V. Davis
Cover Art: Yulia She. Licensed through Shutterstock.com.
ISBN: 978-1-948692-62-5 paperback,
978-1-948692-63-2 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941270
Table of Contents
Sam Pickering
Introductory Notes
Bob Kunzinger
So where are you from?
Johnnie Bernhard
Ignorance or Innocence
Rick Campbell
Celibacy and Ancestry
Maryah Converse
Becoming Bedouin
Susan Delgado Watts
Being Home
John Flynn
Living Between the Leaves
Debra Frank
The Accident House
Karin Hedetniemi
Inheritance
Anndee Hochman
2 Rms, Family View: The Ones We Call Home
Richard Holinger
Cornwall Village: “A Remembrancer Designedly Dropt”
Jamie A. Hughes
Making Room
Robert Iulo
The Neighborhood
Kyle Ingrid Johnson
The House and Its Moments
Judy Johnson
My Brothers
Deb Liggett
Marking Our Place
Mel Livatino
Going Home Again
Geoff Martin
Birdland
Robert Miltner
Into the Bargain
Vicky Oliver
Alice in Motherland
Lea Page
Everything and the Kitchen Sink
Rhonda J. Ray
My Rock
Claude Clayton Smith
Blue Heaven
Marsha Lynn Smith
4 Generations of Black Hair Matters
Bill Stifler
Not from Around Here
Elizabeth Templeman
In Place
Elaine Terranova
Being Home
Lee Zacharias
On a Rocky Inland Coast
Madelaine Zadik
Triumph
Contributor Biographies
Editor Biographies
Acknowledgments
Introductory Notes
Sam Pickering
Words make homes, not bricks and mortar, not even furnishings and family. As words change so do homes. Nowadays I live in an old person’s home. It was a different place when I bought it forty years ago. Since then the stairs have gotten steeper. Liver spots have appeared on walls, and cracks wrinkle across ceilings. The living and dining rooms have aged into storerooms piled high with boxes. Once I knew their contents. Now I don’t know or care. Upstairs closets are thick with clothes worn by me’s that have disappeared. At first three children shared the home with Vicki and me. Time passed, and they grew up and left. Now three small rescue dogs are our family. All are over fifteen years old and two suffer from canine senility.
Years ago, I read to learn more than for entertainment. I still read for entertainment, but now more for recollection. As I turn pages, I discover who I was, where I have been, and sometimes where I am going, or not going. Memory is a wizard. It changes nonfiction into fiction, and fiction into nonfiction. As I read the pieces in this anthology not only fragments from the lives I led and might have led came to mind, but I also wandered the homes the authors described. I wasn’t comfortable in all the homes, but I experienced them. Like the Seven-league Boots of Little Poucet and the Magical Carpets of Isfahan, reading transformed my armchair and teacake existence, and I traveled to worlds simultaneously familiar and different, new and old.
Strangers ask contributors to this anthology where they are from, a question that no one can answer to his own satisfaction. Other contributors discover they are “not from around here,” no matter how long they’ve been in the neighborhood. A person lives in an Accident House. On the street outside cars crash, inside people bruise one another. Some contributors discover they cannot go home, but, of course, in their pieces they return to a home. How does a person fashion a home in a distant land, and when she leaves, does that home vanish into the mist of years? A woman is at home in the history of the Holocaust. A man researches his family. He fails to discover his ancestry, but in the process what he learns about others becomes his facts. For some narrators, and readers, books make a home. A man takes imaginary walks through Chicago to keep close to the boy he “once was and to the family” he came from. I accompanied him; it was my first visit to Chicago. After a fifty-two-year absence, a man visits the village once home to the small school in Connecticut he attended. I went with him part of the way, but then I drifted northeast to Maine and later south to Tennessee.
“Place is the anchor; the rich soil in which we take root,” a woman writes. For some writers the soil is rich; for others it’s barren till. For many readers, place mesmerizes. Several writers cultivate gardens, and their homes bloom. For a woman and her husband home is forty years of hiking. A woman who misses the open landscape of Montana looks out a window and studies the close hills of New Hampshire so that “what might be can take root.” A couple remembers housemates who left indelible prints on their lives. In their pieces, writers mark passings. As a boy, one narrator lived in many houses. Before leaving he helped his father paint the walls. In each wall, he left behind a single pin hole. What does anyone leave behind? Certainly, it is always a pinhole, but if it is accessible like the pieces in this anthology, readers can look through it and see richness in themselves and without and see it in poverty and unhappiness as well as pleasure and joy. For untold moments they will live both their lives and the lives of the narrators. Perhaps they’ll sit and wander Never-Never Lands, in the process creating homes with words. In the beginning and in the middle and at the end are words.
So, where are you from?
Bob Kunzinger
When someone asks the standard question, “Where is home for you?” at a conference, a ballgame, or an airport, or anywhere we go really and meet someone new, the answer for many is not so easy. “Well, I live in Virginia, but I’m from New York,” or some variation of those two realities—where we live and where we grew up—is typical. Rarely do we meet people anymore who have lived in one spot their entire lives. We have to go to Europe for that, the “old country,” where ancestry drills deep into centuries past, rarely wandering more than a few hundred kilometers from one spot.
But the concept of “home” is complicated in our transient, emigrating world. For my part, I usually say New York, though I suppose I could say Ireland, or Germany, or Italy if I had my DNA chart with me. I could even suggest my roots return to the Celtic nomads of five thousand years ago though it is hard for me to pinpoint where, to be certain. Instead I say New York. I have lived in Virginia for well more than half my life and my current house in a small village for twenty-four years, but I am a “come lately” here. And my native neighbors are correct; I will never be “from” Virginia. My son is, though, born and raised here.
The essays in this collection explore that fluid definition of home. These revealing works wander from the notion that “home is where your stuff is,” as George Carlin asserted, to home is where your family is, whether it be a Brooklyn brownstone, a 3B 2 ½ B suburban 2 car garage ranch, or an automobile. One motif is decidedly consistent herein: “Where is home?” is more often answered in reference to a person’s genetic code than a zip code.
Excellent writing reaches up and out of itself; it shows us our pain and often unearths treasured memories and tribulations we thought we had buried for good. With those guidelines, these works invite us not simply into the writers’ homes—ancestral and contemporary—but into our own as well.
Ignorance or Innocence
Johnnie Bernhard
I had to leave. It was not my home. It was my father’s home. He moved us from the suburbs of Houston to the flat coastal plains of South Texas in 1974. Forty years later, I remember the two extremes as visions: the Houston skyline shadowed by petrochemical plants with thermal flares lighting the night like shooting stars, and Ganado, tired and gray, with one road cutting through town and a blinking caution light swinging in the wind. Life was just like that then, one extreme to another.
The people I went to school with were mostly farmers’ children or the working poor, Whites, Blacks, and Mexicans, with too many children and too many bills. They rode bulls and quarter horses in rodeos, drove combines that harvested corn, worked for a local merchant for $1.75 an hour, or were migrant farm workers, who lived at a nondescript motel at the edge of town.
They were proud people, said what was on their mind, and moved without hesitation. They loved and hated the same way, unencumbered. With little restraint in their actions, they drank hard and they worked hard. It was either ignorance or innocence that motivated them. The farm to market roads of South Texas were littered with beer cans, punctured spleens, and twisted limbs every weekend as a testimony to their creed.
On Monday morning, we huddled in our desks in home room, anticipating the news of a classmate propelled through a windshield into a barbed wired fence. For years, ablonde, chocolate-eyed cheerleader, whose head was severed in a car accident, has haunted my middle-aged dreams. She never ages, forever sixteen and beautiful.
My best friend and her family lived in a two-bedroom house that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in thirty years. They were Bohemians, not in the artistic sense, but part of an ethnic group of Czechs who arrived in Texas in the late nineteenth century. In the pecking order of a small Texas town, they were slightly above Blacks and Mexicans. Poor, Catholic, and of eastern European descent, this family was handed a first-class ticket to the edge of town; a place where they rented from a prominent family until some miracle came along.
Five children slept in one bedroom and the parents in the other. There was no central air or heat. In the winter, a twe