home

I want to blog the letter I got today, and since Lorretta is effectively shut down until the new home scene can support a computer hook up, I thought this deserved mention:

She writes:
"...So here I am. I keep waking up in this house -- am starting to believe I live here. Yesterday I came home and played a little basketball with Adrian. It was so great to be doing this in our own driveway, shooting hoops above our own garage after I'd just come out our own back door into our own fenced backyard, rather than the driveway of some other house we were stalking -- wanting, not having -- like squatters, basketball playing squatters...."

I have always had such a strong sense of place, that when my friend is settled, I am settled for her. This is a home. And such a long time coming.

As for me, my house is not mine anymore. I signed the papers and the money is on the way. The realtor sent me a fruit basket from Harry and David, thinking the pears would remind me of home... and they did. So far away now, this girl that grew up in orchards, picking, packing, pruning, running from the lilting foreign voices of brown men, hidden in the trees on spike ladders, hands quick as birds, fluttering branch to branch, filling Mr. Peebler's canvas bags. Mr. Peebler, with leather skin and tobacco-stained chin, who drove his fucking tractor down the dirt road outside my bedroom window at five o'clock every morning, went to Klan meetings at the grange in the evening, and was always old, but died young. His daughters all went crazy. I'm sure he was guilty of something.

And now I am a Portland girl. It rained today, all day, and the commute was over two hours. It was comical, really, as I listened to the traffic reports, sitting in the clusterfuck of Dundee, knowing it would be a long slow road home.

But home I am. The weekend cometh.