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A Bump in the Night

A Bump in the Night

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Halloween is behind us. The skeletons and graveyards that decorate neighbor’s yards have given way to sedate autumn wreaths. But my heart was beating faster yesterday than it did the entire month of October. 

The reason: a bump in the night. The early night, to be sure, but it was dark and it was rainy and the bump sounded like something big had fallen upstairs. 

Was it a cat burglar come to get my jewels (an errand sure to disappoint, I might add)? We crept upstairs to check it out, entered each room carefully, and there was  — nada. No box had fallen from a shelf, not a thing out of place.

There’s a chance this was an outside noise mimicking an inside one. But I doubt that. I’m going to assume it was just a friendly poltergeist messing with us a little, taking advantage of this old house, with its creaks and groans, sending us a message — that we are not alone. 

Stretch Marks

Stretch Marks

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This is a house that has expanded and contracted so often during the last few decades that I almost wonder it doesn’t have stretch marks. 

After so many comings and goings you develop a feel for the ebbs and flows. There is the excitement when it fills again, the sense of life returning to the old place. And when that life departs for other climes, there is, of course sadness but also calmness and stability. 

While it would be easy to call the house emptier after one of these leave-takings, I know that the old place is really just holding its breath. There will be visits and returns. There will be grandchildren crawling on these floors (goodness, I’d better mop them!). 

There is life in this old house yet.

Stegner and Home

Stegner and Home

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It made sense that I finished this year’s “beach book” just hours before firing up the work computer.  It made sense, though it made for less than 40 winks. That’s the way it is — or can be, when the book is good enough. 

In this one, it was almost as if I could see Stegner coming into his own as a writer from the beginning of this 562-page saga to the end. The Big Rock Candy Mountain was Stegner’s second published novel and an autobiographical gem that becomes wiser and stronger as the writer (and the characters) mature. 
I’ve always loved Stegner’s depiction of the American West, his love for the landscape and the way he grapples with the nature of home. And here I could see this in full flower: 
It was a grand country, a country to lift the blood, and he was going home across its wind-kissed miles with the sun on him and the cornfields steaming under the first summer heat and the first bugs immolating themselves against his windshield. But going home where? he said. Where do I belong in this?
…Where is home? he said. It isn’t where your family comes from, and it isn’t where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself? 
…To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place … Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations.
Empty Nest

Empty Nest

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Yesterday there was much fluttering and chirping in the garage as a bevy of Carolina wrens flew in and out the window. For the second or third year in a row Mama Wren had nested on an upper shelf full of old vases, tucking her abode in between a green vase and a clear one, using the shelf in between as a patio of sorts.

The fledglings must have been practicing their first moves over the last few days, when there seemed a confusing preponderance of bird life in and around the garage. There were suddenly wrens everywhere: in the holly trees, at the bird bath, at the feeder and the suet block.

Now that the nest is empty, I climbed up to take a look. How still and silent and abandoned it looked. One fact struck me: Unlike human nests, which empty and refill many times over a lifetime, when bird’s nests empty … they stay that way — at least for the season.

The Lounge

The Lounge

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From my seat on the new living room couch (I still think of it as new even though it will be a year old next month), I can see the monitor I drug home from the office. It’s sitting right where I put it on March 13, when I brought home file folders, plants and an extra pair of shoes. It’s sitting on a table which was itself placed “temporarily” in front of the mantel.

With shelter-in-place edicts in force until June 10 in Virginia, it seems like a wise time to create something more akin to an office. But I’m so comfortable on the couch. And when I want a break, I stand up and work from the counter or take a quick stroll to stretch my legs. When I return, I plop into oversized chair that is, if anything, even more comfortable than the couch.


I think about the ergonometric chair I inherited back at the office, how tall and straight it made me sit. I examine my posture as I type these words, stocking feet propped up on the coffee table, laptop in lap. 

The question is not, can I lounge while working … the question is, can I ever not lounge while working again?
Light Show

Light Show

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There is sunlight this morning! It matters more these days, the weather I wake up with. It will be with me all day, as opposed to office days, when I enter a box of glass and steel and often don’t leave it for nine hours.

But today the light pours into my house, and I know that in the morning it will come from the front of the house and in the afternoon from the rear. And as I sit here in the living room (one of my working spaces, being an office nomad of sorts these days) I can see both the front and back of the house in my peripheral vision.

It’s as if I can see the morning and the afternoon rolled up into one. A preview of the light show that is mine every sunny day, as long as I pay attention to it.

Foggy Memories

Foggy Memories

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A foggy dawn has given way to a partly cloudy — wait a minute, make that sunny — morning.  But my head is still in the clouds as I remember great fogs I have known.

There was a stretch of misty weather in Chicago long ago, unseasonable November warmth that steamed up the city’s windows for days. I walked from my house to the corner where I met my ride as if in a dream, passing stately homes and the distinctive domed church on Deming, pretending I was in Europe instead of the Midwest.

And then there were the pea soup fogs in Arkansas, so thick they made it impossible to drive the 25 minutes from Petit Jean Mountain to Morrilton. Since there were very few services on the mountain, a few days of fog created a desert-island feeling.

Finally, there were the fogs of my youth, which swirled around the big oaks in the Ware Farm behind our house, making those open fields look haunted and lonesome. The farm is filled with houses now, of course. But through the miracle of memory, the fogs and the fields are there for me whenever I want to see them.

Smell of Burning Leaves

Smell of Burning Leaves

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Yesterday’s walk through the fading light of a late fall afternoon reminded me of what has been missing from the season. I caught a whiff of it when I rounded the corner. It was that autumn elixir — the smell of burning leaves.

Its source was unknown — and even if it wasn’t, I would protect its identity, since the practice must surely be illegal. In fact, I hesitate to mention it at all with California burning.

But neither illegality nor political incorrectness can erase the fact that I love this scent, that it fills me with both poignance and peace, an unlikely pairing that takes me right back to childhood.

I would have been playing all day in that scent, would have been jumping in those leaves, in big crisp piles of them before they were set to smolder. And soon I would be walking back into my mother’s kitchen, not my own. And it was the promise of that warmth and closeness that contrasted so perfectly with the lonely fragrance of ash and oak.

This, along with the scent of tobacco wafting from the big auction houses on the west end of town,  were the “smell-scapes” of my Kentucky childhood.  I don’t smell either of them anymore.  But they’re there. All it takes is the whiff of burning leaves to bring them back.

Mirror Image

Mirror Image

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My neighborhood does not immediately scream “cookie cutter houses.” Homes nestle among trees on lots of varying shapes and sizes. Exterior sidings and trims sport an array of colors and styles.

But, truth be told, there are only a few “models” here, and stepping into a neighbor’s house often feels like being on the wrong side of the looking glass. I mean this quite literally since there’s a 50-percent chance, at least on my street, that you’ll be in house that’s the mirror-image of your own.

This was the case yesterday, when we went to look at our neighbor’s bathroom, searching for ideas of how to improve our own. And there, like a twin raised by another family,  was the same house with a very different treatment. The bathroom was about two feet larger, reconfigured and reshaped. And indeed it was instructive in its use of space.

But that’s not what I’ll remember most. Instead, it’s the living room wall that wasn’t removed and the paneled family room that exists because of it; it’s the wallpaper in the hallway and the portrait above the couch. It’s all the unique details that make their house their home.

Warming the Pot

Warming the Pot

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It’s something I do without thinking, idly swirling hot water around my ceramic pot before brewing  my morning tea. I learned it long ago, when I first visited England and took on some Anglophile habits, such as drinking tea with milk.

Warming the pot, I was told, produces a better cup of tea. It prepares the cold surface for the rush of boiling water. The tea will be more fragrant and potent for this effort.

So all these years I’ve boiled the water, swished it around, poured it out — not unlike rinse and spit — and only then have I made the pot of tea. All of this even though I only use teabags — and an Irish brand, to boot.

This morning, for some reason, I wondered what would happen if I took the same time warming myself as I do warming this Brown Betty? What if I woke up gradually, reading in bed, then did some gentle stretches, some devotionals, some writing in my journal … and only then began the mad dash to wash up, make lunch, walk Copper and drive to Metro?

It’s a lovely fantasy — but only a fantasy, one I can dream about … while warming the pot.