When I live in place, I am that place.

The light. The people. They all add up to a presence. Today I shut the air conditioner and opened all the windows. It is lovely. I have been in this house for six years. It’s our first house. We brought the cat we had in Brooklyn to live with us here in the small town. He loved it. When he passed we got two more cats. Brothers. I feel like I am living in a Crosby, Stills and Nash song.
Our house…is a very, very fine house. With two cats in the yard… Sunday morning quiet hovers over dewy grass. September sunbeams shining through the trees make me wince. Green of late summer is the dominant color as I slowly waken with each sip of black coffee. Long I labored in a city of stone and steel. I was comforted by every human being. So many; so many that I could feel a collective heartbeat. It is an urgent rhythm. Ambitious, so ambitious to achieve, acquire, belong. What I have achieved is some time to reflect. My thoughts distill the life experience of numerous doubtful moments into one deep breath of contentment. Now I realize the fruit of struggle. This house we have acquired, this home is not a possession. This yard, our little, simple patch of earth, does not belong to me.

Rather, I belong to it.
September 3, 2023
Places of the Past:
I will tell you something and then give you a poem I relate to it.
My mother was one of 13 (surviving) children. When I was a child we used to visit my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Sam. Aunt Hazel was the oldest of my aunts born in 1900 which was the same year in which my grandparents married. Uncle Sam and Aunt Hazel had a farm and I remember visiting them on Sunday afternoons after church. I remember Uncle Sam plowing a field, the plow pulled by a single horse whose name I've forgotten. I remember the lightening rod in the front yard that all my cousins and I were…