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I’m not sure why I find it hard to use the word ‘home.’ I mean for myself, as in mine. I suppose a trapper’s shack – one small room with a low ceiling, a heavy door, and two small windows – was never meant to be a home, only a temporary, seasonal shelter. Not a trapper’s home for any trapper worth his salt. Of course, I’m not a trapper worth my salt.
Oddly in my youth in the city and in my young adulthood when I lived abroad for all those years, I was too very comfortable using the word ‘home’ for me, myself. In the city I rented apartments – a studio or one-bedroom. In Southeast Asia I lived in a room for rent for twelve years. In a room. Only part of that time with board. And I could’ve considered that my home because the Vietnamese language seemed very clear about the term “nha” (although the verb “ve” could mean either “come” or “go”). At the end of a night out with my Vietnamese friends I’d stand up (carefully) and say “OK, James ve nha,” which translates (very well, thank you) to “Time for me to head home.”
Maybe I could use “nha” to refer to this place, our place, our intimate shelter in a clearing in the woods. I was a poor student of the other languages. I took – French in high school and Spanish in college – so I am less comfortable using their “mi casa” or “chez moi”, or whatever I’m trying to say.
On Monday at noon under the autumn sun I packed up and we departed for five days. I left the dirty dishes unwashed and left food in the cooler on the porch (“nature’s fridge,” my brother says), and set the mouse traps.
There is still fall gardening to be done: transplanting strawberries from one shaded spot to another sunnier, putting up the sage and mint and lavender to dry, harvesting the coneflower and black-eyed Susan and sunflower seeds. In the clearing and landing a mess of projects – maple and poplar poles laid on the sawbuck, a dismantled wheelbarrow, at least one small engine – and detritus: pallets, boats, cans and bottles. Dog bones. Get the stuff put away – and early – because you never know when the first plowable, blowable, shovelable snow will come.
The point being that I left Hovland on Monday with things undone, a physical clutter – which muddles my brain. One last look around and I felt like the famous Red Wheelbarrow. Poor thing had so much depending on her.
The commute home on Friday was exactly six hours from one in the afternoon at my old man’s farm to seven at our blue and white fire number. We’d entered the red pine gate between Lake and Cook counties and dipped over the Temperance in the dark, and drove through the thick cedars along the highway in Cascade state park and turned the big corner at Thomsonite and the other at Fall River, through the big town, up to Hovland. Into the drive to the landing with the headlights on in the dark, and in the lights everything came back – two boats (the rowboat and the cedar-strip canoe), the compost bins, sawbucks, dog houses in the yard.
I put on my headlamp to see by and went up to the cabin, into the screen porch so quiet but cluttered, and in the light of the headlamp unlocked the Master padlock on the door.
Inside it was still and I smelled my favorite smell of canvas and flannel sleeping bag. I lit one light (solar battery LED) and another (the gas lamp) and, geez, I had made the bed before I left, and geez, the dirty dishes didn’t look so overwhelming, and geez, here’s one, two mice only, cold and not rotting.
Gee, let’s start a stove fire (though we don’t need it).
Having gone away in the harsh sun and returned in the magnifying darkness everything seemed finer, quainter. Manageable. Homelier.
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