Going Home

There is a shiny crust of ice on the snow banks lining the highway as the headlights illuminate them. We drive, my boy and me. And there’s something about the way the headlights punctuate the dotted yellow line that makes me want to keep going. To keep driving on a fine winter night when my breath comes in cloudy wisps, on a night when my fingers blanch against the cold metal handle of the gasoline pump. I know this highway—and many other highways, too. The endless Pennsylvania state, the long slide into the Midwest--where, on a quiet summer night long ago, the musician and I were awakened in the parking lot of a truck stop to the sound of a Muslim calling for prayer. I know these roads, this America… The red clay mountains and mesas of a spiritual western land; and further, to the moonscape of an unforgiving Mojave. Beyond that, the land of plastic, of lights, of a blistering ocean threatening to swallow it all in one angry gulp. I have traveled many of these broken roads, my face to the glass, the fatigue of the road heavy in my bones.

Just a few miles up an undulating road, past the yellow lights of living rooms, of kitchens, where put-together families eat, talk and watch TV. Not like the boy and me tonight, broken and put back together... We are almost home.

There are just two of us in her car that day not long ago when she drives to that place under a steel gray sky. In that town where you can lift your voice and hear it silenced by the wind. That’s how I learned that wind could devour sound, ideas, dreams…

Minutes later we are there. Arrived at an unrecognizable place, each apartment with a Craftsmen’s door and a tidy white porch. Crawling along the perimeter road, the car radio silent, my mother and I remember… We cranked the heat, she says. And of course I remember sitting on the hardwood floor, our backs against the empty walls. Our fingers and toes tingling, the heat inching its way up our spines. After months of snow collecting along the insides of the window sills and sleeping together on a fold-out couch; and milk—when we could get it—stored on the floor of the back porch. Then this: the housing project with its crumbling steps, its banged up parking lot. Its thermostats.

But the place we drive around today does not look like what I remember. Or what she remembers.

Keep driving, I tell her. And she does.

And there it is. The old section that the laborers and their tools have not yet pushed into. The familiar brick walls, those ancient front steps, the metal storm doors. She pulls over so I can get out...

I pick my way along an ice crusted sidewalk, looking for home. This French Canadian, this Welfare child. The sidewalk curves up and around, and I lift my arms to steady myself against the ice, the wind. Raise my arms against this frozen town... And I am here, all these years later, in this remembered courtyard, the wind assaulting the numbered clotheslines inside the chain link fence. I hear, and remember, the ping’ing sound of lines slapping against each metal pole. The wind lifts the flaps of my black wool coat as I remember. They didn’t care about us. In our hand-me-downs, our Welfare cards, our empty bellies. Our lack of bootstraps…

It's a few moments before I realize this section is empty. Each apartment window an Alzheimer ghost, gazing hollowly upon this wind razed courtyard. I look from one vacant window to the next, history emptied and forgotten. All those women gone… Their children—like me—homeless. Again.

And tonight—this winter night—the boy and I drive. Up Route 9, to the Division Street exit, and along Oregon Road. Up the hill to a cottage on a small frozen lake. To the warm place we call home.
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