Lughnasadh, August, Whereever Home Exists

It is coolish and breezy, and the sky has gone pearlescent, bushtits and finches and chickadees busy then quiet in the cedars. What is cool in August is different than what is cool in April or October. The  air smells like glorybower, someone barbequeing, dry cedar duff and dry earth, and earlier my hands smelled of crushed tomato leaf, begonia.

Sometimes I think how did I get here, 45 and half a continent away from home? 

But what is home? I am reading Louise Erdrich's The Sentence which feels different and beautiful for Erdrich, and I am homesick for the Midwest, the white pines of Michigan, the two-note song of a Chicagoland cicada, the waters of Lake Michigan this late in the season. Mosquitoes and blackflies. Air so thick with humidity it feels like wet wool, like another skin, another body on your body.

I am homesick and then I am not, for my home is here, salal and fir, cedar and problematic glory bower, sky crowding with crows as we move toward sunset, the Perseids muffled by city light, waning full moon in Aquarius.

Mr. Bill, fifteen years old now, moans from his bed in the living room where he is watching D. eat his dinner. He walks stiffly, has had procedure after procedure for his anal glands, often barfs his breakfast minutes after eating, moans and cries. He is still alive, dog of my now 15 year old divorce. R. and I have been together 10 years this week, married 9 this October. My boy will be a senior this fall. Both of our boys.

I can barely write, my mind skitters off, wrong end of the magnet, I can barely string a thought together. I am 9 years into being a half-hearted college administrator, I give my family a good salary and excellent health insurance and what I value about my job is the people I work with, or what capitalism would say "work for me" but jesus horatio christmas, capitalism and working for The Man is the worst. The. Worst. Capitalism, and hierarchy, and the ways it tells us that some people are better and more worthy than other people, are more human, is trash. The earth is burning, we are in a perpetual disease outbreak. 

Every generation believes they are living in the Endtimes.

And I can't write much, or think,or read, though I have read The Custom of the Country because reading Edith Wharton has become a summer ritual until I started House of Mirth and it has in its first chapter such blatant anti-Semitism that I sent it back to the library, though I have read it countless times before and--being a white woman who was raised Catholic I had the ability to gloss over in the past--I never noticed. It has been probably a decade since I've read it but.  Jesus. And I think well, I fucking can't stand the concept of being a college dean but I work with people who are passionate about what they do even if the system is so colossally fucked and i sing (and am president and producer of) in an opera troupe and a professional level chamber choir and run half marathons and am want to learn everything I can about permaculture and I have this little family that we've scrapped together with scotch tape and hope--My book gets rejected and rejected, as it goes. 

My zucchini, again, are molested by powdery mildew. The chickens are laying sporadicially, and the garden is dry and sad looking. I have loads and loads of laundry that has to be done, a basement so full of shit we are spending our weekend focusing on at least clearing out a space that a human can stand and not trip over eleventy zillion boxes of crap. I haven't vacuumed the bedroom in more than two weeks, there are piles of music and shoes and my cardigans and my running accoutrements on the piano (deeply in need of being tuned) and the kitchen still has a mixed salad of flooring and no ballpark of when the crew will come to give me a floor, countertops, a new sink, etcetera.

At least, so far, there are no fires. At least, so far, we have recovered from COVID and there have been a few zucchini and zucchini muffins and bread and there are a bounty of green tomatoes. It is only August. It is always August. How did I get here, in the middle of my life and up against the bulwark of my boy a senior in high school? This the last summer he is mandated to spend in Michigan. 

And so R. and I obsess over our kitchen remodel that is taking 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 years and our neighbors and we went to the dump last week and I feel safe in a way I never thought possible and I think who gives a shit about me blabbering on about my life and then I think how grateful I have been for all of the women and women-identifying bloggers who have written about their ordinary lives, how incredibly revolutionary that felt 16 years ago when I left my first marriage and thought I was crazy. How important it continues to be, though some have slowed or stopped or life has happened. All I wanted to know, those years ago, was that an ordinary life could matter. 

What took you so long, Bruce?  a voice floats up from the sidewalk, then a giant belch, then the shuffling of feet. I had too much time to think, I had too much time--then another giant belch, then a high, thin moan. R. and D. are inside, watching Get Smart, which R. watched with his late father 40 years ago. The olden dog moans then curls into his bed. The cats--all five of them--circle and stretch and climb the screens and weave between our legs. 

In 13 days, we go to bring J. home. White pine, cicada, Lakeswell. The wet warm air of my homeplace, if I have any homeplace, progeny of people who have  uprooted themselves generation after generation, continent to continent, colonizer and oppressor, in abject poverty and Chicago Catholic middle class of the 1970s where I emerged, small and brown(ish, comparatively) and square (so my mother tells me). 

I wish there were crickets here at night in late summer. That I do miss.