Two more

Remembering that there are numerous recycling centers in Chapel Hill, I took my three stuffed bags of newspaper, glossies, and "mixed paper" to the one at University Mall last night, when I was in the neighborhood on another errand. (It seems contradictory to make a special trip to a recycling center—if you have to burn fossil fuel to do so.)

Well, tonight is our next-to-last night in the apartment, and my back is looking forward to a lie-down. I loaded and unloaded a 14-foot U-Haul today—the main cargo's being 30 or 40 of my wife's potted plants that some former neighbors let us set in their yard until we moved to Mebane. That doesn't sound like many. Only one load? Well, it was about 300 feet from where most of the pots were sitting to the truck, which I parked on the street so as not to risk damaging something on my neighbors' property. And the pots were heavy. I moved 20 or 30 by putting several at a time in a wheelbarrow, but the others required a hand truck (or "dollie'). There was also a four-wheel wagon with a huge jade plant that I rolled up the ramp on to the truck (and rolled down at our new house). And about 20 1-gallon plastic bottles of water, which I took along to help buffer the pots, about half of which are ceramic. That is, they can chip, crack, or break. And I didn't want to damage any of my wife's pot. (She and Wally went off to Mebane early to let in the painter who would coat the new drywall in the garage and touch up the repairs from where we removed the standard shelving in two closets and the laundry room, in favor a more versatile style.)

There was also some other yard and gardening stuff under some other neighbors' deck: two metal benches; several water hoses; two shepherd's hooks and three water hose racks; four heavy rubber-wrapped rebar poles (which a local nursery sold as rose stakes); a large disassembled metal pot stand; a bag of pine bark soil conditioner; shovels, hoes, and rakes; and the wheelbarrow and dollie mentioned above. Oh, and two very heavy rocks. Yes, rocks. One has a cavity in which we poured water for our visiting birds. The other is just a dramatic-looking rock, about two feet long, that my wife likes for me to plant vertically somewhere (wherever she asks me to, I mean). Well, these neighbors have a deep front yard also...I wonder how many miles I walked today loading that truck.

I barely had a third of the truck bed loaded and my back was already feeling none too good. I was so far from having my first load delivered and being on my way back to Chapel Hill by one o'clock or so, that I didn't leave Chapel Hill with my first load until about 2:30. We didn't pack up at our new house to return to the apartment until 6:30.

We had our first experience in Mebane of working out in the rain, just after some new neighbors from across the street had come over to introduce themselves. Within minutes of their leaving (to go to Wal-Mart, which is about a mile away), the rain started heavy then leveled off to tolerable soaker. Not seeing any lightning (although we did hear one and only one thunder clap), we felt comfortable being out in it to unload the truck. Most of the pots had to be moved only about fifty feet. (I think I mentioned in a post of several weeks ago that we were downsizing; our old house was on 1-1/3 acre, our new one on about 1/4.

I felt more than comfortable in the rain; working in thoroughly soaked T-shirt, pants (and underpants), socks and shoes took my mind off my back (well, almost), and I drove the truck back to Chapel Hill feeling quite accomplished, even if I had managed only one load. Anyway, there are only 15 more pots (even if they are humongous). I'll have room to load everything from the storage locker tomorrow, too, plus a few more gardening implements from under the other neighbors' deck. Oh, my aching back....

And raise a toast to good neighbors, bless 'em!

Home, revisited

The topic of home came up over lunch today. My friend said that she has many, many times dreamed of home, her actual physical, recognizable home. To her, "home" seemed to have much deeper significance than the place where your toothpaste or the coffee beans are (as I suggested in my post, "Rounding third," the other day). She thought it was more a question of the people who live (or lived) there with you, and, going by the recurrence of her dream, it also seemed to be a particular, very special place. I had to agree that "the people" in my home too (my wife and our dog, Wally) are essential—so much so that I didn't even think of defining home in terms of them. They were just part of the indivisible "we" from whose point of view I wrote. Wherever "home" was, it was our home.

But no particular physical place seems to have the power to be home for me. I've been amazed over the past few weeks how quickly I've detached myself from our home of twenty-five years, with its rooms and gardens in which I spent literally thousands of hours. I have no sense of longing for that place. (My first few years in North Carolina, I amused myself when asked if I missed California by looking at my watch and saying something like, "About seventeen minutes so far." That is not a judgment about California, which is a fine and beautiful state, not to mention generally more liberal politically than North Carolina is.)

No, I am "at home" in our apartment. I look forward to returning there this evening. To having dinner there. To walking Wally in the apartment complex after dinner. To sitting down there to watch some episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Season Four, before perhaps reading another few pages of Pinker or a chapter of John Mortimer's first wife Penelope's novel about their marriage. (His second wife was also named Penelope.)

Home in the sense of a particular, continuing place just doesn't seem to make it for me. I suppose this could derive from my childhood experience of moving around a lot as my dad looked for work following World War II. I was born in 1943, when he worked in a naval ship yard in Alameda, California. I attended five schools in the first grade before we settled down and I finished the grade in Liberty School, a country six-year elementary school outside Petaluma, California. Except for almost a year away again during the sixth grade (to a logging camp at four thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where my father dynamited terrain for the construction of roads), I finished my elementary schooling at Liberty School and went into the town of Petaluma for the seventh grade, before we moved again to the town (Tulare, in the San Joaquin Valley) where I attended eighth grade and high school.

Besides, philosophically, I am clear that even "my home on earth" is transient. I was born, and I will die. Home here has been wherever I and my people at the time were, us and our toothbrushes (Wally has one too). Many of those people have died and, contrary to the belief of many of them while they lived and of a number of their survivors, they are not in some other home now awaiting our arrival.