Elm Hill Farm, cont.

Father told me that when he was a little boy he loved to come down the ladder, - not the stairs, note - in the early morning from his bed in the loft of the log house to get into bed with his mother.  The fire in the great fireplace was always burning, so the room was at least dimly lighted.  One morning after a night of severe storm, he started down the ladder, and to his horror he saw a great big Indian stretched out on the floor in front of the fire.  The little boy scurried back to his own bed and pulled the covers over his head.  Later in the morning when he looked fearfully down, the Indian had gone.  

That loft in which the children, at least some of them, slept must have been well ventilated in spite of the fact that many people used to think the night air harmful.  In my youth when things were not so we would have them, and there was more or less grumbling, it was common to hear said, “Well, you ought to have seen how it was when I was a boy!  Why when we woke up in the morning in winter, often the snow would be drifted in on the bedclothes!”  Or remarks similar to fit the occasion.

At “Teed’s Corner,” a little way up the road, there stood Teed’s Tavern, a great big rambling house that I dimly remember.  In such a storm as drove the Indian into Grandfather’s cabin, Indians came into the bedroom of the Tavern-keeper, and stretched themselves on the floor.  Hearing a noise in the night, Mr. Teed started to get out of bed to find out what was going on.  He put his foot on a Indian lying on the floor beside his bed.  The Indian’s grunt told him what was “the noise.” He was not at all disturbed.  They all slept peacefully until morning.

I wonder how the women liked these invasions.  They had to get used to it of course.

When Father was born he got some kind of eye infection from the mid-wife or nurse who took care of him.  It gave him a good bit of trouble in his little boyhood.  One day a neighbor found him trudging down the road toward Moscow and asked him where he was going.  “I’m going to Moscow to buy me some new eyes” was the reply.  He outgrew the trouble and his blue eyes were one of his best features. 

One day he started out with a pail to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As time passed the first pressure of things to be done passed too, and Thomas Dodge built his frame house on the knoll beside the barns.

Can’t you think what a pleasure it must have been to move from the log house to the frame house?  The log house must have cramped so large a family and made many unnecessary steps to do the chores.  Did the new house seem large and wonderful?  It really wasn’t.  It has grown to be a large house in the hundred years since it was built and from the first it was of good New England type. 

Why, oh why, didn’t we find definitely the year the family moved? Fred, the oldest member of the next generation said it was 1834.  Anyway it was about that time.

Coming Home

What does that mean: coming home? How is that even possible? Is there a home that one could come back to when everything has changed and we can never be the way we were?

 Isn’t it a shameful to have to return home - a defeat, a retreat, a regression? 

Is it possible for us to see coming home as a beginning rather than an end? 

Our great challenge is, in fact, to return to where we started and see it anew, as if for the first time.  How will we need to see differently, understand ourselves differently, live differently?

In this age of present and impending migrations of people from their ruined home countries, how is it possible to speak of “coming home?”  Or is it more critical now than ever?  Dark times may well be upon us but that does not mean that there are no remedies for our folly and hubris, our ignorance and arrogance.  

To be rich in a world where some suffer and die of hunger, of displacement, of powerlessness is criminal.  Our civilization is a civilization of criminals. 

It is not criminal to be a damaged soul and long for the security that being rich is supposed to confer.  That fearfulness is as old as our species, and perhaps older still. It is not criminal to dream big dreams and do great things.  To create and lead, to organize and coordinate, to excel. (Though one has to ask excel in comparison to what? Each other? Is that the only way we know who we are? By beating each other? By impoverishing and destroying the lives and livelihoods of other beings, both human and nonhuman?  In excelling, don’t we always have to ask: “what am I destroying, making worse by being ‘better than’?”)

I don’t have any answers, only evolving questions. 

The idea of coming home goes against the grain of the American/global capitalist myth of expansion, growth, exploration, displacement, tourism, exploitation.  It is embarrassing to have to go home, to be sent home, to live at home.  One is supposed to be out there conquering all the time.  Disrupting everything.  

Coming home means that one has accepted that there are limits, which is anathema to the American myth of conquest and limitlessness.  (Anathema, heresy, mental breakdown.)

If the myth of conquest and limitlessness is what is limiting us from growing up and seeing the world objectively then we would be wise to speak out against that myth when it is invoked.  If we can never come home because we are afraid - afraid of our mortality, of the idea of limits - then we ought to get over our fears. 

We all go out and return home everyday.  It is a little art-form that most of us spend a life-time learning - to balance work and home. To learn how to care for a home and a family.   We have larger cycles of exploration and return in our lives. As a global civilization, do we know how to come home; how to care for our home with commitment and passion?  Not yet. It is an art we have yet to learn together.  Our next renaissance - in which we build a culture of being at home: in this world, finite and infinite; with ourselves as mortal, gifted animals.  In which we make a richness of life and living things, because that is true wealth.