No Place Like Home

Being in my sister's kitchen I enjoy the sunlight that shines into this day, July 11th, 2024, with the music of Glen Miller putting a sound in the air that has my Dad sitting right next to me with his Sunrise instant coffee in his red-checkered “Fred” mug.  Here now, I feel the safety of a long-ago space, our young family home.  That space was filled with family busyness and noise, once everyone got up for the day.  Dad made sure he got a head start on the rest of us Farkles, with his “Fred” mug and all the peace and quiet a quiet person needs.  Mom could be playing ‘Reveille’ on the piano, with her personal joy about starting an exciting new day!

Or, I feel safely in a long-ago space in our Grandma and Grandpa kitchen, wonderful bowls of cream of wheat hot cereal and buttered toast, all the brown sugar we wanted to scoop into the bowls, with only a “tsk, tsk, tsk” and amused head shake from Grandma.  The yawn of the back-door screen opening out into an orchard of fruit trees, morning glory bees, sprinklers already going and a cool concrete sidewalk ready for us to barefoot along to start a hot summer day finding things, making things and all of it from the nature around us, rhubarb, raspberries, peaches, apricots, apples, pears, cherries, current berries.

Or, I feel safely in the long-ago space of Heavenly Daze, back when it was fizzing with multi-family activity — cousins, parents, grandparents, aunts, friends of various adults, Boney and Alma.  All we cared about was when we could go swimming.

Things are so different now.  I am the second-in-line elder of the whole biological family constellation.  The elders before us are the stars that have gone out of our daytime sky.  Even though their light is not visible to us in our days, the spirit of the stars they are to me still shine in the night, in the quiet remembering, and are now an energy I can sense when I stop thinking too much and invite in the evening calmness instead. 

The peace of good memories is what I witnessed in my three years of providing personal services to elderly home-bound salon clients.  I would enter their sanctuary worlds of fondest memories, pictures of family on their walls, their stories for me, their belongings, antique doilies, telephones with curly cords on the telephone stand, sofa afghans, knobby milk glass vases holding cheerful plastic flowers.  I would enter the world that shone out of pale eyes as they spoke of endearing gone-by times when they were bright stars in their own skies, vibrant in their lives of being immersed in the thriving energy of youth and excitement.  Then, after the telling, I recognized the degree to which the safe place of their remembrances receded when talking about how hard things are for them now  —  this speedway of barely-recognizable social fabric in which they find themselves.   The complexity and disconnection from the too-muchness of how things are ‘now,’ caused an elder face to crease, to wince, to look sad.  They came from flour sack towels, radio shows, town halls, church services that were about kinship, stores that had the basic needs and usually friendly cashiers who actually knew who they were, and no crammed shelves of overstock and too many choices, rising 15 feet in the air, the awful noise-music blaring nonstop, and either machine self-checkouts or numbed-out cashiers who ask, “How are you doing today did you find everything you were looking for?” without even looking up to see their customer, after saying that.

Now I identify with the solace these elders had at ‘home,’  and the privilege of residing in the space that we understand, the place that plays our music, and contains the elements of a time when we felt not only safety, but belonging.

“There’s no place like home.”

7/11/2024 ~~ djl