Eaves of Home

Thinking how it is that I'm not homesick anymore. I don't have a lot of backstory to places -- to most places. At least, not to places where I was a kid. Where my kids were kids, I'm tempted. The campground is good. But isn't that because it maintained?  (Some would say improved, but I maintain it hasn't improved, only made itself compliant to the excesses of rich people who pay 80, 000 for a camper so they can rough it for a weekend out of the year).

If the campground was grown up in briers and bud light bottles, I would not cling, but let it go. The oak circle and the woods edge still belongs to those who camp in tents or pop-ups, and we can ignore (mostly), the rich pretenders.

I'm not homesick. Not saying I wouldn't turn the clock back if I could. (I would turn my mood back -- to when I somehow believed there was uncharted territory and soft edges). But I'm ok here and now.

Been thinking how little I need for the rest of my life. Fifteen years or twenty at the most -- and how quickly fifteen years, or twenty passes by.

Camping year was 1993. The year I remember best. Seems so recent. Was twenty-two years ago. So.  That long yet to come. Flash and it's gone. Doesn't make me sad. Death of older people doesn't depress me. These kids, now. They need to have their time. Do their things.  I've done mine. From here on out, it's more of the same. But I want to stick around for whatever's left and enjoy the here and now.

I take a book from the shelf without looking, open and point to a cluster of words:

words: Eave of Home

This gives me my prompt and itsn't that synchronictic -- good set of words there, thank you book.

Eave of Home (by d K d)

I'm listening at the eave
of the house that isn't here now,
this is made difficult because I have moved on,
I am no longer homesick,
I swam that river, drowned a time or two and
found my breath again, seventh life of the nine,

If I squint this day into that moment of evening when the sun
has gone down and left its memory on the land,
before night leans against the hills for the graveyard watch,
I can listen still,

I can hear your voices who've gone,
who imprinted the space with old conversations,
I once thought this place the proper destination,
Now I know there is a clearing to do,

I'll offer tobacco to the land and venerate the old ones,
and let these eaves keep their stories,
For you, I'll point out the road spilled from the big dipper
into the west where journeys begin.