Home Is Where You Plant It

The kids on the bus were relentless; their tyrant leader lived in our trailer park and was a few years older than me.  He ruled with the iron fist of a seasoned bully.  I feared those bus rides home, so I snuck onto the bus that dropped me off at my grandmother’s house. Child safety and accountability seemed to mean something different in the late 80s.  That worked to my advantage.  My grandmother’s house was my sanctuary.  I hid under the bed in her spare room until my mother arrived a few hours later and furiously pulled me from under the bed by my kicking feet.  I never wanted to go home.  I hated that house and the neighborhood.  Maw Maw, as I called her, was my savior.  During my elementary school years, I would spend days with her. We used to drink overly sweet coffee and observe snowbirds and chickadees at her feeders.  Mostly, she made me feel safe and loved. 

I drove by her old property recently.  Stifling the lump in my throat, I saw the site that served as both my safe place and the home of the one person who understood me absent.  It was all gone.  There is no resemblance to what once was.  The house that was once my refuge was reduced to a pile of rubble.  There is nowhere to escape now.  Where her house once stood, two newly constructed cookie-cutter homes now sit in freshly painted opposition to my memories.  Her gardens were scraped bare.  The peach tree’s branches were once perches for songbirds.  It is now buried under a monoculture of bland fescue grass.  The flowers that lured in hummingbirds and pollinators now lie dormant beneath the wreckage of what used to be.  

The Twin Towers fell.  America changed when I lived with her at that house after high school. I raised my right hand in allegiance to God and Country all while living there. I left and went to war.  Like the songbirds we once watched, I returned home to that very space in due season.  That place was my solace as both a child and a man.  Now it is gone.  When my grandmother died in 2019, it was determined that due to the poor shape of the house, it wasn’t worth the upkeep. Repairs would cost more than the home’s value.  A decision was made to sell the house and property at tax value, a bargain for a greedy developer.  All that was left was a pile of crumbled memories and dirt.  My mom retrieved a few pieces of debris and had an artist personalize them for each of us.  My keepsake was a piece of wood from the house with a poem I’d written pasted to it.  It hangs in my office as the last tangible thing linking me to that property.

I’m intrinsically intertwined with that property and those memories; I’d like to think that some residue remains.  Even though her house was bulldozed when her spirit left her body, her memory remains.  The gardens and flower beds were scraped bare, but the seeds remained deep down.  They now serve as hidden gifts for the two new families that now split that plot of land. Those birds still sing.  The flowers still wait to spring forth with their symbols of life renewed—a hope for renewal.  There are blessings in that soil and a whole lot of love.  Those are the truths I have to hold firmly. 

My grandmother wished her ashes to be mixed with wildflower seeds so we would always think of her when we see blooming daisies, columbine, beebalm, and the like. My inheritance from her property grows in my flowerbeds and all around my house.  I dug up everything I possibly could when we got the news that the house was to be razed to the ground.  I filled the bed of my truck no less than three times with every conceivable shrub, tree, and flower I could pry out of the earth.  So, even though her physical property no longer exists in its former glory, pieces of it grow here.  There are reminders everywhere.  Her climbing rosebush, the angry mean rose bush as we called it as kids, grows on a trellis in my backyard.  Her granddaddy graybeard tree and yucca grow in the center of my front yard, along with myriad wildflowers welcoming bees, birds, and butterflies all spring and summer.  I guess I transplanted one home to another. Home is where you plant it, I suppose.  That gives me a measure of peace.  It also speaks volumes that my family never had much in the way of finances, but the legacies we leave are the intangibles.  Like a love for nature and telling stories that surround it, I can live with that.

Although I haven’t cracked open a Bible more than a few times in recent years, I am reminded of the words spoken by Jesus about a kernel of wheat falling to the ground and having to die first.  Receiving life renewed came on the other side of death.  Perhaps, despite the physical death of my grandmother and the destruction of her home, those memories will live on.  There are now pieces of her legacy everywhere.  Whenever I hear the birds sing or taste the sweet syrup at the bottom of my coffee cup, I am reminded of her.  When flowers bloom and I smell the sweet fragrance from the lilies, she is there.  Home was here all along.  Maybe that was the point the whole time.  It’s not the place that holds my heart but the love that holds it all together.  

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