Setting sun, Erie Canal: Home is where the heart is.

Dear friends,

   I knew that I was going to say good-bye, but to what or whom?

     Fifty years ago, my family moved into a modest three-bedroom home in northern California. In July of this year, another family took possession of our possession, and we were left with our mementoes and memories, and one another.

     In 50 years, the house had been painted three times. White. White walls and white trim. Pine finished natural here and there, but mostly white.

     The lawn had always been intended to be a clover lawn, and had always, and will always, be a Bermuda grass lawn. Bermuda grass, a cousin of Johnson grass, also known as devil grass, was the curse of the neighborhood. My father had always suspected that someone had actually seeded a nearby lawn with the blankety-blank stuff. Bermuda roots and runs, and it can root and run from any joint in the grass, and the grass has a joint about every six inches. Any attempts to pull up the pesky stuff merely exposes fresh joints that root and run. The stuff can cross walkways and driveways if left alone long enough. And the weekly crop of seed heads ... .

     There were roses, a long row of them. The bushes were sturdy with age, and timeless in their beauty. And in the backyard there was a magnolia tree that would send forth huge, unearthly blooms in the dead of winter. Jasmine grew in the warm California climate, and trumpet vine, a haven for hummingbirds, and a favorite haunt of our crafty bird-catching black cat Peter-Paul (a girl cat initially misidentified as a boy catand so given the male parts of the name of the folk-singing trio Peter, Paul, and Mary).

     On the west side of the house, where the relentless afternoon sun created a seared space unfit for human habitation, my father had planted pinon and other found species from the surrounding sun-blasted, drought-resistant, red-dirt countryside stained with iron oxides and graced with manzanita. He would stop his logging truck and dig up shrubs and trees out in the wilds as he brought felled trees of doug fir and sugar pine to the mill south of town. The pinon was a particular success. He had nicked the cambium layer of a pinon tree, propped open the nick with a twig, and wrapped the wounded spot with moistened moss and plastic tape. A few weeks later, he cut below the nick and brought home a rooted shoot, bursting with life and intention. My father was good with plants. His drought-resistant local collection on the west side of the house could not be bought at the nursery.

     I can give you a tour of the grounds, but I won’t take you inside. I no longer have a key, and the thought of walking around inside seems so much more complex and even overwhelming. I’m not ready yet. Besides it’s a modest and small place, more useful than interesting to anyone but me and mine.

     I took away a few hand tools and a bunch of old photographs, and some books. I left behind a beautiful set of 7-foot-long ash oars weathered smooth and silver; they wouldn’t fit in my luggage. While I was there strangers for hire came and took away a truckload of stuff that no one wanted. People called in response to a classified ad, looking for bargains. Our house, in our town, was no more.

     Good-bye to all that? Not really. It’s just different now.

     In the days that I paid my last visit to the family home, temperatures topped out at 116 F. Good-bye and good riddance to that! Redding, California, my hometown, has mild winters and summers from hell. The inclement weather starts in May and ends in September or October. I don’t miss the summers, but I kinda miss the old homestead, and I still worry some about my mom and my little sister, and I still miss my dad, though the act of going across the country to say good-bye has done subtle things to my longing and grief.

     At first, I didn’t intend to go, and I was happy to contemplate the hundreds of dollars that I could divert to my current boatbuilding project. Then I began to notice that the barest of pretexts would bring on a flood of tears, morning after morning. Something hurt inside me, and I was slow to find the source, but in time I realized that I had to be going home, where one cannot go, but must – the place where, when you gotta go there, they gotta take you in.

     I know by heart the address and the telephone number, and I used to wonder what it would be like to have to memorize a new pair of family facts of address and telephone number. There was a time when the stability of the family home was the only stability I knew, as I moved from this place to that place, and this relationship to that, in such bewildering speed that I could hardly memorize my own facts of address and telephone number.

     Now? Now I believe that in my Father’s house there are many mansions, and there is a place there for me, when I really gotta go there. When the time finally came to sell the family home -- a decision of my mother’s, and hers alone to make -- I no longer was so frightened by the magnitude of the change, to the point where I had initially discounted its importance.

     There’s been a death in the family, and that means the end of something and the beginning of something else. I went there, and in the mystery of such sorts of visits, I have experienced subtle but fundamental changes in primary relationships, with mother, with siblings, and with even my father, dead these many years. I didn’t want to go, and I had told myself that I really didn’t need to go, but go I did. I was going to say good-bye, and that’s what I did. In the end, I didn’t need to know to whom or to what I was going to say good-bye to.

     I simply had to say the words.

     God knows the rest, and in time I will, too.

      For now, it is more than enough that I went. To say good-bye.