Home Again

In August, my home town smells like straw, like earth, like smoke - burning wheat stubble? Fireplaces already in use? Someone's 5-year-old discovering the joys of fire? It is clear yet smoky, cool. Windy. Always windy. The earth here is black, really black, coffee ground black. Not like the dusty dirt in the desert, this is heavy black dirt, gumbo, clay that sticks to the soles of boots and turns them into platforms. This is clay, double lattice Fargo clay to be exact. This is home.

Funny, the idea of home. When I told one of my sisters that I had begun work on a project about home, there was a pause. "Home? Like where you are now?"  "No," I said. "Home." Another pause. "You mean Minnesota?" "Yes. Home." Finally she said, "I guess I think of home as where I am now." And why wouldn't she? She has lived there for about twenty years. She completed her education there. Got married. Bought a home. She makes her living there. It is home for her.

Yet if longevity is criteria for what is home, Kansas City should be home for me. I lived there for 16 years. I developed friendships. I took employment with a cool company working with smart people doing a job that I loved. I bought a home, had a dog and even built a picket fence. Really. Kansas City is not home, though, even as much as I love the city.

Home is a house on acres that were purchased from the railroad in 1883 at 6% interest. Home is where I was scared to go down the basement steps, where I learned to ride horses and sew, where I scraped the paint off of and brushed paint onto old wooden buildings. The house is fading now, decaying on fast forward now that there is no one resisting its decline. Three sump pumps have been burned out trying to keep water out of the basement. A limb on Mom's flowering crab has fallen and practically split the thing in half. A gutter is lying on the kitchen floor; it fell off of a rotting eave.


Books stand on the shelves in the living and dining room as though waiting for someone to pick them up. Clothes hang in some of the closets, odds and ends, things people didn't want but didn't give away or get rid of. Some dishes are still in the kitchen cupboards. Upstairs, there are items we used to play with in the bedrooms, shelves and shelves of more books, some first editions dating back to the '30s. In my sister's room, the ceiling has started to come down. Throughout the house there are black droppings on the carpet - squirrels. Smaller droppings on the mattresses - mice.

The grass is now cut by large machinery, great swipes taken across what was once trimmed and mowed by us kids. Shop and barn still contain miscellany: scrap metal, an old welding helmet, oil cans, nuts, bolts, washers, nuts, an engine block lift, on and on and on. What does a person do with a hundred years of accumulated equipment, clothing - stuff?

Most of the small towns throughout eastern Montana, North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota are little morethan railroad sidings next to grain elevators. They straddle state highways, some with not even a stop sign, others with a couple flashing reds suspended over the street. The road runs away from them in front of worn out brick buildings, rehabilitated brick buildings, brick buildings adorned with murals, restaurants in steel sheds with signs out front - Fish Fry 2-Nite! and PABST 2-4-1. They are ditches that don't drain, immaculate yards planted with petunias, CENEX stations where you don't pre-pay your gasoline. They dot the landscape across the plans, slowly shrinking. Around them are the houses of farmers that have retired, died or moved away. Their decay is gradual but inexorable.

People say that you can't go home again. Bullshit. Of course you can. You just can't time travel.