No matter where I end up in the world, there will be one place I call home. It's miles from any town, down a long, dusty gravel road, and I was miserably happy there. Hell of a thing, huh? Hating the place I think of as home.
It's hard to describe how isolated it felt, but if you wanted a place to hide, to figure things out, or just to disappear, It was perfect. Hours would pass without a single car.
it would be utopia for an astronomer, you could see every star in the heavens. Except for a buzzing bee or the summer breeze blowing through the trees, the silence was stark, and on a summer evening you could sit on the porch and listen to the neighbor playing his harmonica about a mile away through the woods.
I lived there with my grandparents, who deserve much of the credit for who I am today. In that remote place, they taught me more than any university would. (Turns out higher education wasn’t really a possibility anyway) I learned to cook, wash my clothes, rebuild a carburetor, make things from wood, and care for a half-acre garden.
I absorbed about a thousand idioms that make me seem older than I am. “No matter where you are, there you are.”
In my soul I was a kid from Los Angeles, but I had attended no fewer than twenty schools, flown from coast to coast countless times with everything I owned in a single suitcase, I even had to stuff everything into a truck to escape in the dark of night with some new destination in mind. Sitting still wasn't in my DNA. How could I consider anyplace my hometown?
Down that dirt road, I would sit in the backyard on a glider and endure bouts of wanderlust. At night I'd listen to faraway radio stations to find out what the rest of the world was doing. When I got my first car, I would drive to the end of that gravel road and lie on the hood under an open sky, watching for shooting stars and the lights of jets, wondering where either of them might land.
My grandfather died one cold January morning, cutting wood to heat the house. A short time later, I got a job offer in another town and left my grandmother behind to start a decades-long pursuit of something I still haven't identified. I missed her terribly, but as I drove away I was glad to see that place in my rear view mirror.
But from my current perspective, I remember that place fondly. I'm not wired in a way that would allow me to live there again, but I wouldn't trade the memories of that house on the quiet backroad for anything.
