Thomas Wolfe
Looking out through white unruffled cat and white ruffled curtains, through apple branches following familiar arcs towards gold grass ground, lies my backyard. Sitting beside the smell of sleeping cat and the warmth of dappled leaves, sense-memories make me aware of Samantha’s of other summers who have gazed idly out, thought through this window frame of mind and waited for the future to climb in. In the opposite window of the mirror, a familiar stranger to this room peers over the top of an i-book.
Wolfe, not Kerry, was right; you can never go home again. You is always changing frames of flesh and points of view and looking out through the windows of the soul of different I’s. Because I grow and grow home in the window box of wherever I see the world out of. Home is something I carry with me and I cannot go someplace I am already at. Far from turtle-like, I take more than the shell of home with me. Home is the loft above Gatsby’s on the street with the smell of fresh croissants and the green shingled house by the river in Lexington and the single in Lawrence on Old Campus and the suite of the fourth floor of Stiles and the front room with the fireplace in the Greenhouse. It is one of the mathematical properties of the function of college that says home divides. Each place is only a fraction of the feeling of home. No longer singular, home take a plural verb. No one spot holds the same security of the place I belong as when I was simply Sam of Spring Street Did. The seed of home is scattered over rooms I have slept and will dream in. Home is not buried in one person or place. Unearthed, I am a walking tree. I take and transplant my roots. I cannot come home. But I never really left my own backyard. Fertile for new customs of thought yet holding old habits of home, my land is your land, this mind is home land. Landing on my feet like a calico cat, I am my own backyard.
Wolfe, not Kerry, was right; you can never go home again. You is always changing frames of flesh and points of view and looking out through the windows of the soul of different I’s. Because I grow and grow home in the window box of wherever I see the world out of. Home is something I carry with me and I cannot go someplace I am already at. Far from turtle-like, I take more than the shell of home with me. Home is the loft above Gatsby’s on the street with the smell of fresh croissants and the green shingled house by the river in Lexington and the single in Lawrence on Old Campus and the suite of the fourth floor of Stiles and the front room with the fireplace in the Greenhouse. It is one of the mathematical properties of the function of college that says home divides. Each place is only a fraction of the feeling of home. No longer singular, home take a plural verb. No one spot holds the same security of the place I belong as when I was simply Sam of Spring Street Did. The seed of home is scattered over rooms I have slept and will dream in. Home is not buried in one person or place. Unearthed, I am a walking tree. I take and transplant my roots. I cannot come home. But I never really left my own backyard. Fertile for new customs of thought yet holding old habits of home, my land is your land, this mind is home land. Landing on my feet like a calico cat, I am my own backyard.
