Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard
A discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day. *

My stepfather grew up in a Chicago ghetto, so I find it amusing that “Home on the Range” is one of the only two songs he sings when he's doing the sorts of homey tasks that are usually accompanied by absent humming. (The other is “Stout-Hearted Men”.)

If home is a feeling, as well as a place, it's also embodied in specific people. It took the better part of 20 years for it to happen, but my stepfather is now one of the people I am truly “at home” with.

Where once I associated “Home on the Range” with the flat part of Colorado (because that's where I first learned it), now the association is with Ira.

*”Home on the Range,” traditional

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Come on-a my house my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give a you
Apple a plum and apricot-a too eh
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house I'm gonna give a you
Figs and dates and grapes and cakes eh
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you everything*

ican from Open Diary writes, in response to Other People's Houses, “Don't just “look” in. Come on in and help me clean my office. ;) ”

I had to laugh at that, because I'm only marginally willing to clean my OWN home. Don't get me wrong, I like neatness and cleanliness, I'm just more a fan of the end result than the process of getting there.

And yet, sometimes house-cleaning can be sort of cathartic. I do some great thinking, for example, when my hands are busy scrubbing pots, and sometimes I like the patterns left by vacuuming a rug. These mindless duties allow me to stretch my imagination.

It's the mental equivalent, I think, of sitting on the front stoop with a cold beer, enjoying a balmy summer evening, and waving at the neighbors.

*”Come On-A My House,” by William Saroyan and Ross Bagdasarian, as performed by Rosemary Clooney.

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Three hours into this, I'm sitting here at the kitchen table with coffee in one hand and yogurt in the other. How am I typing? I'll never tell! (Seriously, I do put the stuff down to type. Boring, but true.) The birds are singing, Cleo is lounging on the deck, soaking in the summer sun, Zorro is in the laundry basket in the bedroom (he's odd that way), and Fuzzy is still asleep. I think he should guest post for me at three AM, just for sleeping late, except his spelling sucks.

Anyway, I want to draw your attention to my campaign page right now, so you can see the list of all my very cool sponsors. Some of them have chosen to be anonymous. That's cool. I know who they are, at least. Well, most of them, there are a couple of names I can't match to blogs or email. But I appreciate them, just as much. (And, I confess, I'm the first Anonymous. I seeded my own pot, but didn't want to be showy about it.)

I also want to thank all the people who are supporting me by advertising my site, sending me pix of front doors (it's not too late to add YOURS – send it to scritture@gmail.com, leaving amazing comments, etc. (I'm gonna list you all later, no worries, but I'm late on this post!)

Thank you. You all ROCK.

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I have a confession. I'm peeking through your windows. I've been doing it for a long time, and I have no plans to stop.

Oh, don't worry, I'm not trying to see you naked, or case your house for future thievery – I just like to look into people's windows and see their furniture, and make up stories about who lives inside.

There's a house in my neighborhood with an impeccably groomed yard, perfect flower beds, and a quintessentially cute gas lamp post (an aside: I WANT A LAMP POST), but there's no sense of warmth despite the magazine-spread perfection. It's as if the people inside have empty lives, and the house reflects it.

I imagine that the husband and wife both work long hours. They probably have two or three children, who have unexceptional lives. They aren't a rah-rah family with “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers or a lawn penant supporting their school team, but one of those leftover-from-the-fifties displaced-in-time sorts, the kind who put plastic on the furniture.

In my imagination, they have a house, but they're not home.

And I feel just like I'm living someone else's life
It's like I just stepped outside
When everything was going right
And I know just why you could not
Come along with me
But this was not your dream
But you always believe in me

Another winter day has come
And gone away
And even Paris and Rome
And I wanna go home
Let me go home*

*”Home,” Michael Buble (writer credit to be added later.)

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I'm sittin' in the railway station

got a ticket for my destination
hm …
On a tour of one-night stands my suitcase
and guitar in hand
and every stop is neatly planned
for a poet and one-man band.

Homeward bound
I wish I was
homeward bound*

I love to travel. I love seeing new places and exploring new things, and I get a rush when I'm in a plane at take-off, just as I get a wistful pang when I'm saying goodbye to someone at the train station.

When I'm away, though, I always feel just a bit off-kilter. I don't sleep well without my piles of pillows and the warm bodies of my dogs pressing, the weight of them pressing the sheets down near my toes. If Fuzzy's not there, the bed feels huge and empty, even when it's only a twin.

Listening to some vintage Simon and Garfunkel, sounds I grew up with, I'm suddenly struck by the notion that people who enjoy travelling do so, in part, because of the joy found in coming back home.

*”Homeward Bound,” Simon and Garfunkel

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Every morning she would exit through the door with the seahorse handle, and pass beneath the tree where the iguana made his nest. Some mornings, she would pause, and leave him an offering of passion flower or bougainvillea, a taste floral treat. Most mornings, though, the dog would be yapping at her heels, urging her to get going now, please.

They would walk the beach, the woman with the golden-brown skin, and the small sand-colored dog, and they would pick up shells, discarding them if they weren't perfect. The woman would dip her toes in the salty ocean and commune with the sea, remembering schoolgirl fantasies of riding the back of a giant sea-horse, and using seaweed for a bridle.

After an hour, when the sun was just becoming uncomfortably warm, they would turn and walk back home, bringing with them the scent of sea and sand, and the dreams of magical ocean grottos.

We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus' garden near a cave *

*”Octopus's Garden,” The Beatles

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Home where all the mums can sing,
Back where the children don't cry,
Home where you never ask why and
Everybody has enough, and y'don't have to put on clothes
Nobody has to hide 'case everyone already knows.*

Talking with Fuzzy the other night, musing over whether we'll ever have a child now that I'm nearly 35 – 11 days, god, that's so soon! – we cast roles for future family members. His is large, and he wants his sister to be godmother to this child that doesn't exist, hasn't even been conceived, though has been considered.

“Only,” I tell him, “If Jeremy is godfather. ” I don't point out that I've never had any such conversation with Jeremy. I think, but don't state, that it has nothing to do with one's organic, pagan beliefs serving as a balance to the other's conservative Christianity. It's just, there are some people with totally warm, comforting souls, who have a core of protection and strength even when their tempers are flaring.

Some people who know, without it needing to be said, whether you need a mocha or a hug, a dish of raspberries, or a totally irrational giggle-producing conversation .

Someone who you would totally trust with a small child, because he has never, and will never, lose touch with the child inside him.

Some things, I explain. Just feel right.

So, no we're NOT pregnant yet (for the record), but if we ever are, hey Jeremy, you're gonna get a phone call.

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When I think of home
I think of a place where there's love overflowing
I wish I was home
I wish I was back there with the things I been knowing.*

The last time I saw The Wiz, Michael Jackson was only mildly weird, and I was all of twelve years old. I remember sitting in the living room of a house that never quite felt like ours, a rented cabin (and I use that to mean “3 bedrooms, 2 stories, but built of logs”) in Mariposa, California, sipping Orelia (a tart fruit soda – grapefruit, I think), and hearing the song “Home.”

Even though I was surrounded by my own things, my own family, I knew that that building was not home. We might have lived there for a while, but there was no connection to the house, the land, the town, the people.

The thing is, it's possible to long for a sense of home, even when you're technically AT home. Why? Because it's as much a feeling as a place.

My mother was – ishere

*”Home,” from The Wiz

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I'm goan' to move
From place to place
To find a house
With a golden stair
And if that house is red
And has a big brass bed
I'm liiiivin' there.

Those lyrics, from one of the songs in the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown have been with me since I first saw the show on tv, in childhood. Debbie Reynolds played Molly, of course, the Colorado hick who somehow became a wealthy woman, and later survived the sinking of the Titanic, but somehow, it's not her legendary activities that I remember, it's the line about the red house with golden stair.

The other thing that keeps her rattling around in my brain is that my grandfather used to tell me all the time about how she had small hands, like mine. “She would wear gloves and put her rings on over the gloves,” he said, “to show off how tiny her hands were.”

I'm not so sure about that, but it was a nice image when I needed it. (To this day, my hands are tiny, and no amount of stretching my fingers makes certain cello positions even remotely comfortable.)

In any case, I share other things with Molly – I've been instilled with a sort of bi-annual wanderlust. After two years ANYWHERE, I'm ready to try something new – it's been a pattern since I was a kid, and I'm fighting hard to control it as an adult.

It's funny, but until I looked up the lyrics this morning, I remembered them as talking about a red door not a whole red house, and I was excited because I have a red door. But then I looked them up. Still, while I don't have a golden stair, and our bed is a funky wooden thing with built in reading lights, my house is technically red. I mean, it's brick and all.

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