Home

At 18, I wanted out. Home was

Underrated. Parents placed unjust

Demands on teenage zeal and black

Swan wings, felt slick with ire and judgment.

By 20 I was on my own, forming walls around

A home that drew upon the rhythms of

Hard work and whispers of father’s calloused hands.

Guiding hammer to plank and pen to paper and

Boy to manager. Home became an out of reach ideal.

At 25 on visits to what family held as home and hearth,

My eyes would glow with youth, Christmases, and

Thick gooey sauces hand crafted by mother.

But shadows pinned my thoughts to distant paper walls that

Bent nails and rusted screws were struggling to

Raise. “Welcome home,” some friends might say, not knowing

I’d never lived there. “Are you home for the holidays?” Others

Asked, forgetting I was left behind, a budding man with granite

Jaw and ivory, untested hands who labored some 600 miles north

To forge a briary path, thick with thorns and deadfalls.

At 30, I added my own aspiring youth to life’s counting pen, pasting

Colored panels of jungle beasts and bright striped fish

On walls my labors had pinned to warped beams.

Was this home? For him it became one. For them, it was mine.

For me, I couldn’t remember, or at least, I couldn’t feel

The differences between distance and sweet oatmeal cookies.

Was home a four-walled vessel? A looking glass? A hideaway?

Or was there home in hugs and patient smiles that

Celebrated all the good, the bad, the uncertainties. That held together

Across miles and careers and missed connections,

No matter the gaps.

At 40, I watched my mother, sick with cancer’s curse, winnow away

In bed, in shadows, in sorrow, in something that wrenched

Any sense of space from my maligned model of this enigmatic place called home.

As her hair fell, the veil collapsed, the lights dimmed, and

I knew that home was so much more than walls or space.

Home was and always would be

The love and light that flows between the threads of intimacy and family.

Home is all memories, good and bad, all tears and laughs, all presents

And forgotten grocery store lists, all triumphs and failures.

It is ground into the marrow of life, into the meaning of

You and I and Them and Us

Home is We, and when I think hard enough,

She is home with me now, today and always.

Home…

Home is here.