Where I draw the line

Despite my long dry spell in posting here, I actually have several entries in the works. I'll get them into adequate shape for posting bit by bit.

But first priority is to get out of the way something I really kind of don't want to say, but feel I have to.



It's difficult to argue with this man, after what he's given for this country. Nobody has earned the right to his opinion of the Iraq war more than this guy has, both by the sacrifice he's made and just by being there in person, which I certainly can't claim. Some of the people I admire most differ with me about it, and I do admire this young veteran. History will pronounce the final verdict on this war.

I support his, or anyone's right to think it's a necessary war.

But when he says that if you call the war a mistake, THEN you disrespect the soldiers, it crosses the line into something not even he has the right to say. Why? Because he's not disagreeing with me, he's telling me what I think -- and disagreeing with it -- and nobody gets to do that.

I will not Make Nice about this. I have high tolerance for being disagreed with, but a very low tolerance for being told what I think. I have an even lower tolerance for the venerable tactic of false correlation: If you believe X, then you are required to believe Y.

I think I can see where it comes from. There's this completely bogus idea floating around, that to oppose the war means that one holds the soldiers to be stupid. Or -- and this is outwardly "nicer" but more condescending -- that they're valiant and admirable, but naïve.

No. Nobody close to a veteran sees it that way, and that's a lot of us. You can't really be close to a combat veteran without coming to some level of understanding about the sacred trust they keep. Those soldiers, sailors and Marines are holding up their end of a trust on which the defense of a nation depends.

I happen to believe that the leaders, whose own sacred duty, as the other end of that trust, is to send people to war only in a just and necessary cause, have violated it. I happen to think that intentionally costing people their lives for dishonorable motives is despicable beyond words.

Again, history will tell whether this is such a case, but even those who think the war may be a mistake can have tremendous respect for these soldiers, for their sacrificial support of that sacred trust, a self-sacrifice that transcends the particulars of this or any war.

I think the young veteran in the video is a hero and that he personifies the best things about this country.

I believe that keeping a sacred trust is never a mistake. I believe the war is a mistake. He has every right to disagree with me, but not to tell me that I can't hold those beliefs simultaneously.

Larry (in the foxhole) in training before shipping out to Vietnam. 1968.

Used by permission.

Respite

An email from a friend wondering how we fared during the storm awoke me to the fact that not everyone knows we're OK! Thoughtless of me to leave anyone hanging. We're fine. The damage was north, around the state border and up, and we got just a hard rain. My heart goes out to those from the Caribbean to Galveston.

The first storm prep of the season is the hardest. Now some of that work is done and won't need to be done again. The timing of that batch of storms was deeply lousy, and getting through others would be a little less difficult. If nothing else, our inland friend Leila says we can bring our 3 cats to her place if need be. Whew.

So while storm season is still with us for a couple more months, we're relaxing a little for the moment. Scooter finds all storms to be an extreme inconvenience, and to be evidence of Poor Management on the part of his slacker Hoomans. Now that we've had a few sunny days, his daily rounds are less interfered-with, so he has decided we're doing an acceptable job.

DO. NOT. WANT.

A sukky couple of weeks ahead.

The chores.



The stores.

We have to be ready both for going and for staying. A bad direct hit means finding shelter for us and 3 cats -- and maybe for a long time if there's damage or destruction. An indirect hit or a category 2 or 1 means .... ain't goin' nowhere. We rode out a cat 1 in 2004 and it was pretty mild.

Either way, and it took Larry to think of this, the trees around the house needed major cutbacks. It's a toss-up. They can provide cushioning from flying obejcts, but the limbs themselves, without breaking loose, can simply whip the windows hard and break them.

Plenty of water,

food that doesn't need cooking,

batteries. Stored in the pantry along with all the other junk that's in there. It's a nice little interior windowless space and we can nail it shut.

Plastic tubs for valuables. It's not enough to just stash things in them. We'll seal them.

Cat supplies.




Fresh air.
The yard as we hope it will still be when all this is done.




Town Square.

Our favorite coffee shop, Appalachian Java, just off the town square of Burnsville, NC. Up in the mountains. Where I wish we lived right now.

In a couple months we'll look back at all this and ....

No comment

McCain orders convention curtailed for Gustav:

"McCain said in an interview with NBC that it was possible he would make his acceptance speech not from the convention podium but via satellite from the Gulf Coast region."

I think it's supposed to be funnier!

Half the fun of this one is following the chain of blogs that led me to it:

First ronniecat's friend Xtreme English discovers this funny blog called Whoopee.

Then ronniecat passes it on to us.

Now Antonia, the Whoopee blogger, discovers Yearbook Yourself.

Trouble is that the picture you create is supposed to be goofier and much less like reality than this! Isn't it? Not only is one of them rather like my senior pic, but it's the one they use for the same year - 1972.

In fact, i wore glasses regularly then too, but took them off for the real photo back in '72.

MushroomPalooza

Lots of rain. Lots of mushrooms.

Wood Storks

Taken today, about an hour ago. Actually, Wood Storks and a few Great Egrets hangin' out. Photos are awfully dark, but various tries resulted in these as the best ones. While tropical storm Fay is gone, we're still getting this almost-daily storm cloud buildup.

This is a favorite tree for all kinds of marsh birds, all year round. Picture 2 -- look left to see the gang, on the anvil-shaped clump of branches -- gives you an idea why. It's the perfect vantage point, allowing them to chill but view all the marsh comings and goings.

Blessed company

Cypress knees
Brookgreen Gardens, June 2008


I've tinkered with this post for nearly 2 weeks and I quit. I'm posting it, even though I can't quite get satisfied with it. I think the issue is the reason - no satisfactory solution exists.

My first reaction to the Lambeth Conference articles was a verbose think-piece (longer than this, believe me!) on how the Anglican Communion should and could maintain unity, though even as I wrote it I was practically apologizing for chirping "Can't we all just get along?" This fight over the legitimacy of same-sex relationships and the role of gays makes Christians look like bleeding idiots and guess what? We are.

I changed my mind about the unity thing. Followup stories like this are the reason.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' willingness to set aside his own belief on the issue, in order to work against schism, seems selfless, and I think he means it to be. But how much personal compromising, and I mean by all sides, would it take to prevent a split in the Anglican Communion, and what the bleep kind of price is this to pay for unity?

The gay issue hits the Big Three Jackpot of being: (1) hotly felt; (2) uncompromisable; and (3) elevated to article-of-faith status. Christianity has been dividing and subdividing and sub-subdividing almost the whole 2000 years over things people consider so important that they insist they rise to the level of "articles of faith."

I might sort of understand that: yeah, isn't sin exactly the issue at the heart of Christianity? The faith is built on the belief that we need redemption, so how can it be unimportant to define whether something is a sin?

I can sort-of-understand it and still think it's boneheaded stupidity to define whether one is of the "true" faith based on such things. It doesn't rank these issues as trivial to say that not every important thing is of crucial primary importance.

In my opinion only one article of faith is needed : Christ's atonement. That's it. That's all. We'd be more like what I think we're supposed to be, the "blessed company of all faithful people."

That wouldn't solve everything. Even atonement has a bunch of interpretations, plus it still leaves out people who don't hold that belief, but here's the thing -- it would move us whole lot closer, though not all the way, to the ideal of excluding only people who want to be excluded. The more specifics we build into the rule book, the more people we exclude without their consent.

Maybe it's my bad mood ("Really? We couldn't tell...") but I'm fed up and I say: end it. Split. I'm starting to think it’s the necessary evolution of Christianity. Maybe we need for the church to become a mosaic of a gazillion small groups -- and I mean way more splintered than it is even now -- for any underlying core belief to at last become dominant and maybe unite us again in the distant -- very distant --future. To fight it is to drag out a process that apparently has to play out before Christianity can leave schism behind and get back to healing the world.

Isn't every problem it faces one of healing? We talk about healing the body and about healing the mind. We say we need to "heal" personal and social rifts, as though that's a metaphor, but it's not. I think it's literal, because if there is an Absolute Truth that defines what is right or wrong in every issue, why are we unable to see and unite behind that truth and close the case, unless our insight is broken? The controversies would vanish if we could get our lines to God repaired. Till they are, I'm for this or anything nonviolent that ends the stalemate.

I admit I don't care deeply about my denominational identity. My brother, too, left the Episcopal church 20 years ago for one that reflects his more conservative beliefs and that helps us be at ease with one another. If we were fighting for denominational "territory" bad feeling would run higher.

It's different for people who are strongly bonded with the church they've attended with their friends and family for a lifetime. The idea of schism is deeply painful. Am I advocating a nice healthy thing where everybody affiliates with a fellowship in which views they find abhorrent intrude less, enabling them to cool off? Or am I a defeatist? Am I shooting too low? I admit I'm not sure.

As long as humanity is riding this ball of confusion, unresolvable issues will divide us, and maybe we need to treat the journey like a trip through a maze, in which we have to take paths that seem to veer away from the center in order to actually get to the center. Maybe we need to face the pain of formalizing our differences before we can make them secondary and view each other as fellows in the blessed company. This post is loaded with "maybes", but there's a saying: "The only way out is through." I think it might apply here.

I wanted to include a recommendation for this profile over at nellieblogs. Not because I think it supports this largely grouchy and negative post of my own -- on the contrary, it was actually one of the few mood-elevators I've run into this week+. If my post is a downer, follow the link for an antidote. Reading it reminded me of what's good and healthy and blessed about the company.

Book mending

Odd, for this time of year -- instead of the typical now-it's-here, now-it's-gone afternoon thunderstorm, we had a relatively cool, quiet day of steady rain. Good day to spend mending a few of the world's tatters by repairing books.

This is more a How I spent My Day post than an advice essay, but here's what I did, for what it's worth.

1. I repair a book only when I'm willing to destroy its value. Honest - if you even think it may have value, repair will most likely destroy that value. When in doubt, don't. Repair it only if you want to use it! I don't repair them if I plan to sell them. The ones I mended were only for me and others who asked.

2. The right paper and glue are a must. I go to the craft store and hit the scrapbooking section. This paper is designed to take glue without getting soggy, and it's acid-free, and you can get colors that approximate the various shades of vintage paper. You can also get acid-free glue, and it even comes in a bottle with a nice pinpoint tip. The wax paper is also a must.

3. If one little bit of the original connection is still hanging on, it's worthwhile to me to loosen it. I want to make a whole new hinge.

4. My method is to make a hinge by shingling a new piece under the free edge and then over the other, still-intact side.

5. This part is important and hard to describe: the new hinge needs to be tucked into the binding in a natural S-curve. Otherwise when I open the book after the glue dries, the paper "bridge" that spans the break will just split apart again. You can see this better on the 1912 bird book, its repair job illustrated below.

6. I place wax paper between the repair and the intact side, then close it to let the glue dry.

The last picture shows a wonderful bird book I repaired long ago. I add it because the color contrast of the paper shows the shingled hinge structure better.

Addendum: A comment already! 8~) and I need to add something:

The book I show the steps for, above, and this one also demonstrate that it doesn't matter much which direction the repair goes. If the better free end is on the inside cover (the demo book in the above photos) I use that and glue the hinge onto the free endpage. But if the free endpage edge gives me a better one, as it did in the bird book, I hinge under THAT one and glue it to the inside cover.

It's Chester A. Reed's Birds of Eastern North America. Doubleday, Page, 1912. Color on every page, and a bittersweet reminder of when the ivory-billed woodpecker was merely "rare."

Yep, I wanted to keep and handle this one, which is why I repaired it. It's a wonder I ever sell anything.

Zap! (update)

About 8PM last evening an intense thunderstorm was on us, and lightning zapped a tree just across from the house. It was one stunning explosion.

Photo no. 1 just gives you an idea of how far it was from the house.

Today I was interested in getting a close-up of how nature operates. You can see in the third photo, the way the bolt split the bark in a spiral down the trunk.

Your Intrepid Photographer had to beat her way into the underbrush to see its down-to-the-ground progression (photo 4)

There's about 4 feet of undamaged bark, then the splitting picks up again, so it must have charged through the tree. It remains to be seen whether the tree will make it!

Downyflake, the anxiety-ridden cat, is traumatized for life, though.

UPDATE:

The drama continues! In last night's much milder rainstorm, the top above the strike snapped off.

Consumer Life, Part II

Because sometimes you see it and you just have to have it.

Consumer Life, Part I

This was in today's mail.

Today is July 26th.

eBay feedback policy update!

My sincere thanks to Christy for cluing me in about this eBay announcement, which indicates that their ridiculous policy of counting neutral feedback as negative --about which I posted recently -- has had the approximate lifespan of a mayfly! Yippee!

Purity

Content Advisory : this fictional work-in-progress takes place among college students in the 1970's and contains some crude language and jokes.

--

An October afternoon in 1973;
a dorm in a Midwestern women's college.
The 1st draft of this passage was written about a year ago.

--

It wasn’t till she reached Woodard that Audrey realized she was hugging the bookbag. She shifted it to her shoulder and yanked open the lobby door, which sucked an exquisite damp‑sweet scent out into the sharp October air.

Somebody’s huge vase of yellow roses, bearing a birthday-themed envelope, awaited its addressee at the reception desk. She stood awash in their marzipan fragrance.

A burst of laughter brought Audrey out of her trance. She ventured around the corner, where a cheery crowd of about twenty was decorating the lounge for the Woodard Halloween party.

“‑‑need to ridicule everything.” Stephanie Anderson stood at the piano, spacing construction-paper autumn leaves along a string of red yarn, and reprimanding someone.

There was Gwen, of all people, elbows on the piano and holding the yarn’s other end. She jabbed leaves onto it with a big darning needle and slid them down toward Stephanie.

That’s right, Gwen likes this Dana Girls school chum stuff.

Others chopped leaves out of red and gold paper, using little blunt grade-school scissors.

“I completely agree. We should save it for things that need ridiculing,” Denny responded. She glanced up from her task of drawing leaf veins. “Audrey! You can be Diligence!”

“Oh stop being idiotic.” Stephanie yanked leaves irritably.

Might have known Denny was the one goading Stephanie. Wow, this is a sight. Gwen, Laurie, Denny and Steph, working together on the same project.

Well, not exactly together. Far apart in a fair-sized crowd, actually.

“Here. I’m sick of leaning over.” Vickie abandoned a lounge chair, slid cross-legged to the floor and resumed leaf-cutting with her arms propped on the coffee table. Audrey shrugged off her coat and took the seat as someone else pushed orange paper within her reach and tossed a pair of scissors on top of it.

“Stop being tight-assed,” Denny answered Stephanie, using her favorite tactic of saying something rude in a bright, lilting voice. “Audrey, we’re getting up a group to come to the Halloween party as the Seven Holbrook Virtues!”

“It’s the Seven Ideals, and there’s nothing wrong with them,” scowled Stephanie.

“Seven Ideals, fine, whatever!” Denny turned back to Audrey. “You know how they used to elect them and parade them in gowns like a prom queen court? Laurie’s going to be Responsibility. I, of course‑‑“

Denny dropped her paper leaf, assumed a spacey Beauty Queen smile, and hoisted a boob in each hand.

“‑‑am going to be Charm!”

Rowena Something ‑‑Heidt, that’s it‑‑ a First Floor who sat next to Laurie in the leaf-cutting group, chortled. “Display those charms, now!”

Denny complied by pointing them in various directions like searchlights. This produced howls of laughter from the room, with the exceptions of the leaf-stringers.

“Charm,” said Stephanie patiently, “was not one of the Seven Vir‑‑ I mean, the Seven Ideals.”

“So tell us, what were they?” asked Kaaren Bishop, the Fourth Floor RSA, with convincing innocence.

Stephanie sighed. “Responsibility, Unselfishness...uh...”

“Diligence,” supplied Gwen brusquely. “Honesty, Service, Faith, and Love of Learning.”

“Holy shit.” Kaaren pursed her lips admiringly. “We’ve actually found a freshman who knows them.”

“Every freshman used to have to memorize them and pass a test,” Gwen stated, then eyed her string of paper leaves critically. “These are too uniform. We need to vary the sizes.”

“I can do that!” Rowena quickly began to trim down a leaf.

“Wait, I know,” said Denny. “What we ought to dress up as are the real Holbrook ideals. The things every ladylike girl really was supposed to conform to in the olden days. Charm. Obedience. What else...? Grooming!”

“Hygiene,” Laurie corrected.

“Yeah, that’s better!”

Laurie bounced in her seat. “Please can I be Hygiene? Let me be Hygiene, please!”

“Of course, dear,” cooed Denny, “you can be Hygiene.”

“Godliness,” suggested someone Audrey didn’t know.

Vickie spoke up: “Yeah, and Laurie has to stand next to whoever that is.”

It took a beat for most of them to get it and the laughter burst out again.

Denny flipped a leaf over and began to make a list with her felt tip pen.

“Hey,” said another of the serious types, “those are for the party.”

“It’s one leaf, for God’s sake. Okay, we’ve got...” Denny scribbled. “Charm, Hygiene....Obedience....Godliness. We need three more.”

“Wait! Purity!” Again, it came from someone Audrey couldn’t name. From one of the upper floors. Beautiful figure, big nose.

“Oh, but everybody had to be pure back then,” said Denny.

“It sti-still makes a good Deadly Virtue,” said Laurie.

“Yeah. Okay, you’re right. And whoever comes as Purity can wear a big doctor’s certificate of virginity.”

Gwen gave a hiss of disgust, tossed her threaded needle onto the piano with a clink! and stalked out of the room. Kaaren looked at her retreating back, then got up and took over the leaf-stringer job.

Denny ignored the drama. “Vickie, wanna be Purity?”

"Why me?” laughed Vickie. “Anyway I can’t afford a dress for this.”

“Aw, c’mon. We’ll get some of those ancient formals down at Community Thrift.”

Vickie shook her head. “I can’t even afford that. Wait, though, could we borrow costumes from the theatre department?”

Apparently Rowena was a theatre major. “I can maybe sneak out one dress for somebody, but we can’t raid the costume collection for all of them.”

“One’ll do fine” said Denny. “I can alter any thrift store dresses if people need me to. Audrey! Wanna be Purity?”

God damn my little girl looks. “Sheesh, can’t I be Godliness instead?” She took a completed leaf and used it to trace two more onto a sheet of orange paper.

“Come to think of it, you’d make a better Obedience,” Denny grinned.

“Yeah,” Audrey muttered, cutting. “Tell me to jump and I’ll just say Ooo, how high, and thank you.”

“Uh-oh.” Laurie got serious. “Bad day?”

Audrey shrugged. “My schedule might get fucked up.”

“In the middle of a semester?” Kaaren, the RSA, looked concerned.

“Only if I want to drop English and mess it up myself.”

She could feel Laurie and Denny watching her. She gave full concentration to trimming her leaf.

“Drop English.” Typical Denny, never asking a question, just dropping a statement in a skeptical tone so you had to explain.

Audrey shrugged and examined a finished leaf. “If I want to. I need to make some of these small, don’t I?”

Don't even read this whiny entry

Really, skip this entry. It will be nothing but whining, despite the fact that everybody's healthy, we're threatened by neither hurricanes nor wildfires, and plenty of people would be glad to have problems as dumb as this. I don't care. Just ignore this post.

Something woke us both at 3:30 AM. By the time we were fully awake there was no clue as to what had done it. Probably, I figured before I dozed back off, a last rumble of a storm that had peaked earlier, around midnight.

Woke at 7AM with a whopper of a migraine. Whimpered. Took stuff.

At 8, Larry marches into the room. "Somebody broke into the car. That's what we heard."

"Uh-oh! The gas tank!" My first thought. Gas theft is running rampant, often obtained by a costly gas tank puncture.

No, thank heaven, apparently they were just looking for money or small valuables.

But: "Did you leave any mail from banks or credit cards out there?"

The headache's better but I struggle to think. "I don't think so, but maybe we'd better call the police before I touch anything."

"Don't bother, they won't fingerprint the car for something this minor." I struggle to my feet. Dress. Go down to inventory the car junk.

It's really funny. We have nothing that anybody would want to steal. They'd gone through every pocket, glove box, trunk, all for nothing.

This reminds me of one of my long-ago moments of amusement, circa 1982, when I owned my AMC Pacer. Exited my apartment one morning to go to work and found that someone had considered stealing my car radio, until he discovered it was merely an AM radio and not worth the trouble. He was apparently so disgusted by my poor taste in electronics that he forgot his screwdrivers. A standard and a Phillips, there on the driver's seat. Nice quality set. I used them for years. But I digress.

So Larry calls the sheriff's dept. in case they want all the reports. And oh, they sure did. This is happening a lot. Kids, they say, just looking for money, credit cards, iPods, other things that people Much Less Intelligent than we are leave in their cars. They steal CD's too, she said. This also amused us, since, for some reason, they had left Mozart, the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, and Norah Jones. I'm sure they really wanted them. They must have gotten interrupted. Yeah, that's it.

Anyway, I mix my protein shake and sit down to read comics online while we await their arrival. Larry goes out to meet them. Comes back in.

"Boy are you in trouble!" he says, but he's grinning. Turns out they did want to print the car. Turns out he told them "his wife" had opened the door and examined things. (Actually, he admitted his own examination of the car to them, but that wasn't the story I got!) Turns out he failed to mention that I wasn't going to until he scoffed at the idea. (Must...plot....revenge...). They dust and depart.

As this pseudocrisis winds down, we are informed that EIGHT out-of-town guests will arrive, starting tomorrow, in overlapping shifts.

And this while we have a flea infestation.

There's no excuse for having a flea infestation, with these cool hi tech monthly treatments. But...

(Here's something AA members are cautioned not to do: whine about how they're singled out for problems, "Oh I'm so special, nobody has it as hard as me-e-e-e!" )

But I swear, if Frontline, ordinarily a fantastic product, makes one bad batch a year, we will get it. Murphy's Special Law Just for the Pleistocene Family. But we did get a batch that did nothing, might as well have been Aquafina. (Yes, I'm going to tell Frontline, when I remember to bring the box upstairs for the batch number). And poor Scooter infested the whole downstairs with fleas he was not supposed to have. We switched to Advantage, he's flea-free, but the downstairs has become a biting nightmare. It's been professionally treated once, to no avail. Needs another treatment, but with small children arriving and Scooter needing someplace to escape the heat.... Well, we'll work something out. Scooter is fine in the foyer at night, so daytime, he can be out and about while the garage is...being dealt with.

At least the fleas aren't in the upstairs living space but I'm complaining anyway, o-KAY? Time for Excedrin.

So that's the news and the prospects for the week ahead. I want chocolate.

Great granddaddy's flag

46 stars, circa 1910, in rows of:

8 - 7 - 8 - 7 - 8 - 8 stars.

About one story tall - it's hanging off the second-story porch rail on its annual Fourth of July chance to wave.

Professionally preserved about ten years ago, with as much cleaning as could be done and a backing which enables single-sided display only.

Rainbow

Taken about 15 minutes ago

Random notes

See what I put up with?

OK, alright, I strew hair clips around the house, but sometimes they come in really handy. Like, when I have a half-eaten bag of crackers and all the chip-clips are in use. Why not just clip the bag closed with the nearest paper clip, piece of tape, or ... hey, there's a hair clip right at hand. One, OK, I put one on the bag to hold it closed.

But then I get up the next morning and find this.

8~)

It fell off a truck.

No, really, it did. This poor shrub was lying beside the road withering in the sun. We stuffed it in the car trunk and planted it here, guessing as to its species. Possibly a camellia, in which case it should like this partial-shade spot.

The new finch mix is popular.

Lousy photo, partly because I took it through rain, and partly because zoom really erodes picture quality in this otherwise nice little camera. But it shows every perch occupied, and somebody awaiting an opening.

And in this other bad photo, you can see a painted bunting there -- the brightly colored guy on the pole.

One of our dwarf peach trees has two peaches.

And last but not least...

...in trying to read the T-shirt that ronniecat's cartoon avatar was wearing (over on her blog but the avatar changes clothes frequently!), I went to yahoo! avatars ...

... and got distracted making one for myself. It shows just what mood my computer is putting me in. I'm trying to finish two editing projects before dealing with the problems, a decision I made before new problems with the cursor, and with highlighing text, showed up. To continue is a gamble, but I was so close to finished! But I do have backups...

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad

56 years today.

1952

6/28/08

Things

I grew up in this little house. I took the photo on a nostalgic visit in 1999, but it looked different in my time. From 1957-1966 it was white with dark shutters and an unsheltered concrete front stoop. The arrow shows my bedroom and the dormer I gazed out of on my own nightly version of Neighborhood Watch. Those front lawn trees were shorter then and their leafed-out branches filled my view, though winter's bare branches let me see starlight. On ground floor right is The New Room, a cozy den added on by my parents in 1963. I accidentally dropped a spoon between the floor joists while I was eating ice cream one evening during construction. I expect it still lies buried in the foundation like Tut's treasure.

This was our 4th dwelling in my lifetime, and there would be 2 more. But the little white house was "home." Catherine, whose post about home got this train of thought started, mentioned the importance of place as a "source" of who we become. This was the place, for me. I was aged 3-12 there, and that house was a constant through a decade of huge change.

I grew, learned to read, battled the multiplication tables, got sick and got well, believed in, and then stopped believing in Santa Claus, gained crushes and ambitions and lost my only-child status of almost 7 years when my beloved (eventually) brother was born. My concept of an orderly law-abiding world shook the day in 4th grade that our teacher announced the shooting of John Kennedy, and I came home to find my mother doubled over on a hassock with a box of Kleenex in front of the TV, crying. And it crashed with the suicide of my friend's dad down the street.

That house shaped in me a concept of home as a place that stayed stable while nothing else, within or without me, did. My room, the tree outside. The two elderly gentlemen who lived at either end of the street and would meet on the sidewalk in front of our house and argue politics. Salesmen and deliverymen who had the same route for a decade and became warmly greeted friends. The tiny neighborhood soda shop and newsstand where kids could stock up on Double Bubble and the new comic books ....and that I was still walking to later when I got interested in Redbook's short stories and the always intriguing "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column in Ladies Home Journal (housewife magazines fascinated me from about age 9 on. How I fell into that reading habit I have no idea).

I guess I had that feeling of permanence long enough to keep me looking, hoping to find it again. I never will. Not in a house or its contents. In each of 3 Opportunities For Growth -- a Charlotte flood, Hurricane Hugo, and a divorce -- more of my valued possessions have been culled out. Life shift after life shift shows me that the key is something I've just barely come to possess: a little eye of the storm inside me which houses my essential "self" and will let me transplant it somewhere new. Theoretically I could do this with no beloved memorabilia at all. Theoretically. I'm not there but I oughta be.

This could turn into a post about spirituality and how "this world is not my home," and for me that's part of the answer, but I see that calm eye in people of all brands of spirituality, and of no spiritual belief at all. New climate and terrain, accents and local traditions... for people who carry the calm eye within them wherever they go, these things are details. They color life, they don't draw its features.

Hurricane season is here again. I have a shelf of hard or impossible to replace books. Some are common printings that I value because they bear my grandparents' bookplates. Stuck between them is The List. It's my evacuation checklist of other treasured things scattered around the house. All I have to remember in a crisis is to go to the shelf, get The List and follow its instructions. I could get what matters most into a laundry basket. With advance warning, I can get secondary-priority stuff into a couple more. Things are the home I can carry with me, my seeds for transplanting to make a new home.

Like anyone who watches the news, though, I know a bit about disaster. Lead time is a luxury many don't get, and no inanimate object can be counted on. I really hate that thought.

We dream about our eventual mountain retreat, the place that will be our "real" home. "Someday," we say, "when we can get some land, we'll make the exact home we want." Once we pay off some other debts (and $43 fill-ups for a Civic ain't helping), we plan to look for a spot, maybe with a secure little storage building, and begin to move some of our most cherished belongings to it, out of storms' reach. But I know it's an illusion. One good mountain wildfire could sweep through. Larry, who's been through his own versions of the loss-thing, thinks it's possible to regain a lot of that safe and settled feeling, and I hope so but pessimism is my old buddy. I'll always expect the world to be lurking on the doorsill trying to pick our locks, but if I can expand my inner eye-of-the-storm, I can ride it out.