Home is my great white whale. For as long as I can remember I’ve searched for it, turned the thought of it over in my mind and longed for the coordinating x and y of permanence and thriving for the perfect place. Growing up, I wanted to be from somewhere, but my family, kicked around by my father’s Air Force career, tumbled from state to state. Back then, home was neither a haven nor the place of a warm welcoming embrace; instead it was a battleground. Still I clung to the idea of home the way I thought of love then—as something that would save me.
When I left my parents’ house, my living situation was too often disrupted by more instability, this time by a series of roommates who departed for greener pastures, coupled with a few who, like a fist full of landlords I’ve known, were on the verge of bat-shit crazy. One housing situation went up in flames—literally. Another dissolved when the cops were called. I scrambled for decades trying to find my tiny patch and a place I could afford. Finally, at forty, I signed a lease on a 500 square foot, wood-stove heated cabin on top of Overland Mountain with my dog, Elvis. For ten years, I thought I’d found home.
I outgrew the cabin the day the artist lover and I decided to take a step closer to each other and move in together. Pickings on the mountain were slim post-100 year flood and so we packed our bags for the prairie, a move I’ve always seen as temporary. While I made a a home with Greg, I still felt displaced.
“I feel like a plant that’s been plunked down in landscape that isn’t native to me” I tell Greg, “I can survive, but I won’t bloom.” Our edge of the prairie existence with its proximity to highways and aggressive commuters, streetlights and other people’s backyards has worn me thin. I miss inky nights smeared with stars and the quiet days after the summer birds have departed. I miss dirt beneath my feet and uneven, belly-soft ground. I miss the pine forest dotting the landscape and bear and mountain lion passing through. I miss the view of the mountains rising like a prayer, the sense that not every patch of land is inhabitable by humans. I miss silence. I miss space.
Placelessness is a grief bigger than any I’ve endured. Living in the Overland cabin taught me that I did indeed have a place. It doesn’t matter that I was born on the edge of the desert, the mountains are my native ground. When I left the zip code I’d had on my permanent mailing address for nearly twenty years as I lived in and around Jamestown coming and going to grad school and a series of living situations, including at the High Lake cabin, I sobbed as I handed my key to the post office clerk in the same way I sobbed when my dog and constant companion of fifteen years, Elvis, died. Leaving was a grief.
Three years later, Greg and I have begun the happy, if somewhat fraught, task of locating a permanent address and of making our home in a place where we can thrive. I long for four walls that belong to me, a patch of ground big enough for a home along with a writing shack that will house my desk, a wood stove, and a fainting couch along with my books. Greg wants a studio/workshop and a patch of sun for the garden. Of course I want to return to the mountains, something Greg has come round to, in part, because it means so much to me. Trouble is, we live in Boulder County and even the little Overland Mountain cabin wouldn’t come cheap by most people’s standards. Greg, ever the optimist, is hopeful we’ll find just the right thing while I fret over mortgage estimates and the return on our investment in taking on too much of a fixer-upper or something a bit smaller just at the time when I want to be settling in for the long haul. There are so many variables—many of them having to do with the two too common denominators of American life: time and money—that I am wringing my hands just when I should be rejoicing: I’d never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be able to buy a house.
And maybe that’s just it. There’s a chunk of me still invested in the struggle—I’ve had so much of it– a stubborn piece that wants to believe I can’t have what I want.
For now I’ll simply have to take my cue from Greg, who is a dreamer, and dare to imagine the best of all possible worlds: Six months from now, on June 5th, Greg and I will be happily celebrating the release of Rough Beauty (pre-sales available on Amazon) in a (perfect) mountain home of our own.
