Styska se mi po tobe

We're on vacation this weekend through Monday. We're not going anywhere, our preference is to stay home and do things around the house that we haven't had a chance to do for months.

Today I cleaned up the patio furniture that was given to me by a friend (Thanks Diane!) and found some beautiful cushions to put on the chairs; green and tan silk, with an addtional silk throw pillow ~ delicious and gorgeous. I found two light green votives and a pineapple candle covered in green leaf spines to burn. We had wine and ate chinese carryout on the front porch and discussed the meaning of American freedom of the press vs. legislation in advertising. How romantic? It is for us, I have no idea why....

We talked about colors for the house, when we'll paint it, how we'll bring the roof line out and around to break up the starkness of the facade, and then we walked barefoot up the street in silence in the dusky evening heat...

I was holding his body last night, me behind him, spoon-like while watching Richard Dawkins on youtube with him, looking at the curve of his chin, his ear, down his neck and praying, 'God let Richard Dawkins be wrong, let now be forever so I'll never have to be here without him.' Richard Dawkins said something about how we think we will have the past with us always because of having been there before, but he said it's not true because the people we were then no longer exist; we are completely different beings now. And I thought to myself, oh no, no, I will trick you Richard Dawkins because even if I am different now, fresh new parts and all, I know I left me behind there, a molecule or two in the old places that became part of where I'd been and who I was. A bit of my hair maybe, a skin cell, some sexual juice or saliva, something of who I'd been still lives on everywhere I was.

It must in some way.

I stopped at a garage sale today in the house next door to where I spent my younger childhood. I walked in and the lady started to talk to me so I decided to tell her, "I have something weird I'll tell you." And she said, "What?" I went, "I remember coming into this very garage, the only time I'd ever been in here before, when I was 8 years old and I came in it because the people who lived here had a garage sale and I bought a Donny Osmond album." She said, "Oh, was it the Merediths?" I was like, "Yes, it was actually..."

She said, "We bought the house from them, we are only the second owners. They were very old and couldn't take care of the house anymore. We had to step over oxygen tubes to see the house when our realtor took us through! I felt very strange looking at a house with people who lived in it. Usually people leave when they show a house. But they stayed while we were here."

I said, "Oh I see, do you know if they are still living?" She said, "No, I think they are both gone now." So I said to her, "Well I think it is so strange to be in here again after all these years. Visiting a garage sale of all things."

She said, "Speaking of strange, their daughter was very strange.."

I was remembering that myself, remembering buying the album from her at the first garage sale. She was very heavy and dark. I remember she went to school with my sisters but they never spent any time with her. I remember seeing her photo in their yearbooks. I remember her dark hair, her black, cat-shaped rimmed glasses, and her black and white clothing.

The lady, the new owner of the house said, "We came in one morning before we moved in and she was sleeping on the floor and there was no furniture in here. Just carpet. And she was asleep on the floor. She didn't even live here anymore."

I thought it sounded like something I would do, but didn't say so. Then she went, "She had a black Cadillac and sometimes we would see her drive by here after we bought it. She would drive by really slowly..."

I said, "Oh would she?" Never divulging for a moment all the times I drove by the house I used to live in next door. How even now I wonder if the garage my dad built still has my writings on the two by fours under the joists where I wrote pieces of myself forever there.

But I did mention to her, I said, "When I was coming through the football field on my bike to cross the street to get here, I breathed in and smelled something so familiar and I unconconsciously said the word, "home" to myself. I breathed again and again just to capture it somehow. Maybe she felt the same way."

She said, "I dunno, she just kind of freaked me out."

I could see that.

"I've lived here all my life so it feels like this is where I belong."

She said, "Oh I've lived here 20 years." So I said, "Then this is home to you now?" She said, "No, it will never be home. Down south will always be home to me. I don't think I'll ever feel at home until I go back."

Milan Kundera talks about this in his book called "Ignorance." He says that the return is a reconciliation with the finitude of life. He uses Odysseus as the example of how he chose the yearning of the return as opposed to the adventure, and after he arrived on the shores:

"Then Athena wiped the mist from his eyes and it was rapture; the rapture of the Great Return; the ecstasy of the known; the music that sets the air vibrating between earth and heaven..."