How versatile, pliable, handy the word “home.”
Slippery as soap, foamy and comforting in a body way.
It was someone else’s room yesterday, but today, it has winked,
it has taken our toothbrushes into its interior. Its name
rolls off our tongues after a day of being on the outside:
“let’s go home.” The way of its shutters, the doors,
the morning jasmine, corners where the sun enters
and where it doesn’t, the ways of home. Wherever beauty strikes,
that becomes a home, a place of alignment, shelter, a quiver of peace.
We are pliable, something of wanderers. Those who are also
between places recognize us. The Dutch-Swedish-Kenyan
owner of our “home,” now settled in France, peered and asked me,
“But do you really feel American?” I could have said the easy no.
It forced me to say I wander by choice, at least partly because
I am, at least partly, American. My complicated hybrid self
longs to constantly de-familiarize. My heart seeks its
kin, values, values, a parasol pine, a chance meeting with a kind stranger.
The creative need to refind a flowing fountain, to re-source,
to see what trouble I can find on the lost road.