My childhood home was on a solitary, isolated street across the road from a river. It ambled below a steep embankment bordered by lofty cottonwoods and blackberry brambles. The simple white stucco, two story house sat on roughly two narrow acres, was trimmed in dark green and had a high sloping roof. There were three bedrooms and two baths and green shag carpeting. A vast basement with a workbench and party room where my parents drank whiskey sours and grasshoppers with their friends. A separate two car garage with a creepy, dusty attic sat adjacent. The house’s most distinguishing feature was that the living room had a domed ceiling. In front was a grassy yard lined with rose bushes, irises, coral, violets, and California poppies. The house itself was surrounded by blue hydrangea, pink and red azalea, a large red flowering camelia, and lilac. The gravel driveway was edged with more white, lavender, and dark purple lilac and blazing yellow forsythea. A massive oak stood at one corner of the yard and next to the garage were tall narrow cedars. A stately white barked willow was outside my bedroom window. Behind the garage was a towering walnut that supported my tire swing. Beyond the garage was “the barn” where dad kept his ancient tractor, lawn mowers and boat. My sister’s black shetland pony, Shadow, also lived there on cold winter nights, smelling of oats and hay. A spiffy above ground turquoise pool sat across from the barn surrounded by flowering quince, vine roses, and yet more lilac. Past the pool there was the summer garden with corn, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Pale green and deep purple grape vines ran along the property from the tall cedars to the end of the garden. Further on was open pasture with apple and plum trees. Then finally the back pasture where daffodils and asparagus grew wild in the spring and Shadow munched all day on grasses while meandering among fig trees. At the very back there were more cottonwoods and a dike that kept the river in if it flooded. I can still smell the fragrant purple lilac, taste the sweet grapes in the fall, feel the silky ears of corn on their stalks, and see the sturdy trees reaching over the house.
I wake up each morning in my mother’s house surrounded by lacy things, frilly objects, girlish figurines, and dolls with vacant stares. The day zooms in abruptly and for a moment I’ve forgotten where I am. Not a morning person, I get up in a muddle and start my routine: Tea with milk, look at the paper, read the funnies, take a shower, have some breakfast, and work on my small hand full of design projects. Then break at mid-day for a couple hours at the gym and back to the house to do more work, write, surf, or maybe a bit of thinking about present circumstance.
It has been 6 months since I left New York. I drove away feeling ambivalent, excited, scared and unsure of where I was going. I didn’t know what to expect and my anticipation was high. But, what started out as an adventure towards new horizons has resulted in an exploration into personal history, a examination of connectedness, a realization of want, a clarification of family, and a definition of home.
As I’ve moved through my days and wandered in familiar places, I’m surprised. Surprised by the understanding that I no longer belong here; that I don’t fit in. I know it in my gut. I feel the disconnection to my surroundings and my family is as alien to me as I am to them. What I have here is a past but not a life and memories do not coincide with the person I’ve become. It has been 25 years since I left and I am clearly someone else. A ghost in my separateness as the voice in my head keeps asking when I’m going home.
I realize now that the move was about the road. The sense of movement towards a personal definition; an evolving emotional and physical landscape; the need to step back and take a look at it all. Returning to Oregon was something I had to do. To try because I have always wondered. To find out finally where I belonged—or at least where I didn’t. To discover who I was in relation to my past and what I wanted. A part of me wished I had know this from the start but it never happens that way. It can never be easy. You have to take to the road, find your way and reach a destination—usually without a map and oftentimes alone—to discover where you are suppose to be and sometimes to end up where you started. I never felt that life in New York was perfect. Far from it. I had the typical love/hate relationship with a city I knew very well. Nonetheless, I lived my life there and built relationships. The discovery that it is a place of home and family snuck up on me from behind. It tapped me on the shoulder and caught me off guard. I wasn’t conscious of what I had because I was always looking elsewhere. I’ve wrestled with this sobering reality of discovery. There may have been mistakes, still there are no regrets in this episode because now I know. But I fear the possibility of losing what I had. The answers are still incomplete, however the pieces are falling into place.
Each morning I stand at the window and look to the horizon. The sky is different each day. Some days are heavy and dark, thick with rain. Some bright and blue and windy. Some a bit of both with rainbows. I’ve been seeing eagles lately making their daily rounds, looking for food. They ride the updrafts and currents as they head toward their nests by the river. I see our old house from mom’s deck on the other side of the freeway. It no longer is a home but an office for a small trucking company. Many of the trees and gardens are gone and the back pastures are now warehouses. The barn was torn down and the grapes have been dug up. I look at it from a distance just as in memory and sentiment. Almost all has changed. I am no longer the boy who lived on that solitary road and I am no longer the man who drove away 6 months ago. But lilacs are still my favorite flower.
