painting by barbara humphreys
Home From the Hill
“Home is the sailor, home from the sea--& the hunter
home from the hill.”--Robert Louis Stevenson.
H O M E:
A residency,
a place where one lives,
a dwelling,
a hogan, teepee, or tent,
a crib, a shit hole, an abandoned
building, under a bridge, the mean streets, the planet, a warm place where
a family unit can keep out of the storm,
an undiscovered country,
a dot on the landscape,
a red roof with two chimneys as seen
from some Google satellite;
A brick house next to, & rented from
A Baptist church in Ballard.
Another house in Greenwood, with
a grapeless arbor leading to dead grass in the backyard,
with a low roof over the back porch,
that I could walk out on from my bedroom window,
& pick the ripest pears from the top of a majestic tree;
A Victorian farm house in Coventry,
when it was still country,
next to a large barn where I learned to play
handball, with a wide creek crossing
the south end of the property, where we were
serenaded by a bullfrog chorus nightly,
& up on the hill, into a green belt, that tree house my little brother
& I built from saplings,
short fir & alder branches, pounded
together with huge nails we found in a rotting bag
in the barn, strung between four Douglas fir,
used thrice, then forgotten.
Another farm house, this one rudimentary, near
Panther Lake, built up on stilts, with plenty of room beneath it
to pile our extra junk,
where we actually had to use an outhouse,
summer & winter, & I had to chop the wood
for the two wood stoves, slicing into my foot once with a hatchet,
where my loving grandfather, who
felt sorry for our pioneer plight,
came out for over a month, dug us a cesspool,
put in a septic tank,
and installed a real toilet on the back porch,
where we had to hang Army surplus wool blankets
that smelled like gun oil & stinky feet for privacy.
A large wood frame house right on a main street,
across from a park, one block from an elementary school,
rented from Delridge Auto Sales next door,
that had a three car garage, where
my Dad, trying to please my sister,
bought an old swayback mare, kept it in there,
so that we kids & our friends could ride it
up & down the alley until the neighbors complained &
one afternoon the cops came & spirited the nag away;
where at 12 years old I was given
my first car; a 1939 Buick, and instructed
“to take it all apart, then put it back together again, so that I could
learn about such things.”--which I did, spending two months
creating big piles of doors, fenders, & engine parts;
but what I actually learned was that
I had no viable mechanical aptitude, & could not put it back together
again--disgusted, my Dad tossed all the parts onto
the naked rusted frame, & had it hauled away.
Ten elementary schools,
three Junior Highs,
two high schools--and although we never ran around in colorful
Romani wagons
or lived in a storefront,
gypsies we were;
so when I think about Home, it was not ever
merely a structure, it was more a place
where my heart resided--
for it became my own responsibility
to calm my restless spirit,
to put down roots,
to work for one employer more than twenty years,
to find the right person to share my life with,
to raise up three daughters,
to create a semblance of permanency,
a place where grandchildren can visit,
where old bones could find solace,
where a heart could memorize lullabies.
Glenn Buttkus
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