jiggedy jig
Usually when I go somewhere, I’m not that anxious to come back. A day at the coast or a summer in Greece or six months in the Netherlands – it never feels like enough. I may get cravings for certain familiar comforts. I may miss friends. But I rarely ever think for more than a moment, I wish this trip was over now. I wish I was back home for good.And part of that, maybe, is that I’ve never lived anywhere that felt much like home, any more than anywhere else. Certainly not the suburbs where I grew up. We lived on a street with no sidewalk, in a neighborhood with nothing to walk to. When I was in third grade my parents remodeled the house and I asked for a tiny room just like the one I’d had up until then. They laughed and said I’d like my new big room. I didn’t. At seventeen I fled for a nine by seven dorm and never looked back.
New York didn’t feel particularly like home, either. New York felt like Fun and Late Nights. New York felt like a toxic indulgence that was heady and rich and easy, as long as I didn’t get stuck there. As long as I didn’t become one of those addicted New Yorkers, twenty years in, saying I can leave whenever I want to.
Eugene felt like a fine place for four years.
And I’m realizing, in making this list, that it might sound like my rootlessness is some long-running problem. But it suits me pretty well. I like feeling equally at home wherever I happen to be. It’s one of those things that only starts to feel inappropriate when I’m surrounded by people doing something else.
So it surprised me this weekend, away on an island in Washington, how much I wanted to come back home. My friends were getting married and it was a beautiful wedding – a five tier cake and a swing band and a bride dressed like a princess. Fresh cherries and mountains and the sound of waves in the morning. But I didn’t feel like meeting new people, and I missed Operaman (who was singing all weekend), and I missed my garden. It’s the middle of June, after all. We’ve had a cold wet spring and there’s a lot to do out there.
So Sunday afternoon I pulled up in front of my house and fifteen minutes later my hands were in the dirt. I dug up the hen-and-chicks from my vegetable bed and put them on my front stone wall; I reluctantly cleared the nasturtiums. The tomatoes and the peppers went in at last, though I fear it’s still not as warm as they’d like. I unwound the new hose and with great delight found that the outdoor faucet with no handle still works with a wrench. And I stood in the early evening sun showering my ten feet by thirty: the sweet millions and yellow pears in their cages, the floppy little pole bean seedlings, the lacy little carrot tops just starting to show.
Portland, so far, just feels like an experiment. Parts of it have gone terribly wrong but parts of it are just magnificent. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay, to be honest. I already miss the feeling of Being Away – I hear it tapping its foot at the end of every five day forty hour workweek in my cube. But as experiments go, this one seems worth a while of run time. And while it runs I’ll pinch the flowers off my dill, and sow my squash.
posted by tortaluga @ 3:51 PM
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