Going Home

The song says you can never go home. You can journey back to the latitude and longitude of the city of your birth or childhood. The journeys vary by means of transportation or route or the people that accompany on your way to revisit your roots. How long the trip varies. But how long is it before you realize why you left? Or wonder if you could ever move back?

You come home as the starving college student who gets three days off and leaves after the dinner shift in the restaurant that helps subsidize tuition and drive 12 hours through the dark across the plains of Minnesota and South Dakota. You bring your roommates home to go prairie dog hunting, or cruise through Custer State park on a Gold Wing when your heart stops when a deer is hit by a Suburban and comes careening into the bike. And you relax—the motorcycle wasn’t even dented.

Or you fly across the Canadian Rockies with your new family to show them the ranch you grew up. Your husband sits up front in first class (benefits of being an air traffic controller); you sit in coach with the girls. Thank god they weren’t teenagers. Unfortunately your new family has recently seen Pauly Shore’s “Son-in-Law” and believe all South Dakotans are inbred.

Or the gut-wrenching, tear-filled, vodka-dulled trip to the hospital where Mom lay in a coma, unrecognizable from a brain aneurysm- the hollow, haunting pulse of the ventilator echoing in the room. And after days of helplessness, waiting in the ICU, going back to your “real” world until more information was available. Reboarding the Northwest jet again a few days later to make the funeral arrangements.

The years tick by. The budding 10 year old landscape photographer takes a black and white (before it was trendy) with the free camera her parents got for opening a savings account. Boy did I need lessons. Or a better camera. Don’t miss those 126 mm boxes.

The Hill, 1976 The Hill, 1986 The Hill, 2008

Thirty two years of growth Three decades bring tree growth, photographic technological advancements (I LOVE digital SLR), pounds and wrinkles. And still, you wonder where the time went. How could so many revolutions around the sun go by so quickly?

And can I really be thinking that I miss weeding the acre garden, harvesting, and canning & freezing the zuchinni, beets, peas, beans, corn, tomatoes. 1976 - the year of the beet. We must have canned (although why it was called that when we put them up in pint Mason glass jars) a couple hundred jars. Toward the end of the 80's Mom finally threw the last of them out. Or 1981 when zuchinni grew like dandelions. Cake, bread, muffins, cookies. The only thing we didn't do was bread it and deep fry it - I might have liked it then. Husking bushels and bushels of corn. Tassel silk that coats the body and tickles.

Or sitting on the 1957 Case tractor going round and round and round the alfalfa fields with the mower, the rake and the baler? Dad's army surplus water bottle filled with warm boarding on hot well water behind the seat, next to the snakebite kit. Ever vigilant for baby deer and rattlesnakes. Ducking from the diving barn swallows feasting on the disturbed bugs. The joy of being relieved by one of your siblings and going across the highway for a cold can of Coke and an Otter Pop - grape flavor. The summer days whittled away sans Ipod or MP3 player. And how could I forget the sneezing. Alfalfa allergies! Good to have those big red farmers handkerchiefs.

Branding and dehorning the calves to start the summer. Shearing the sheep (I was so glad when Dad sold the herd). Stomping the wool in a 10 foot long burlap bag. It probably wasn't 10 feet, but I wasn't very tall. And let me tell you natural lanolin sucks.

Horse shows and rodeos. Beauty, the bay Welsh pony, that was an expert and faking a hurt leg as soon as we arrived at the arena. Take her back home and she would gallop out to pasture. 4-H projects - baking, photography, arts & crafts. And the culmination of summer, the long awaited Central States Fair in August. We saved aluminum cans all year long for ride tickets.

As a reward for transforming the green stalks of alfalfa tuffed with purple clusters in to brown prickly bales of hay, Dad would take the family up the road to the base of Mount Rushmore to the Dip-a-Lot Ice Cream Shop. A double scoop of ice cream in a sugar cone. Aah the decadence. I was a cookies and cream dipper. Yummm.

And here we are back again in 2009. My suitcase is upacked, the air purifier on since Trixie the cat is now allowed in the house. The green shag carpet in the living room has long been removed. The view from the picture window is still beautiful. But despite the fact that I have been gone for twenty five years and there are still some spice containers in the cupboard from when I graduated high school, I still feel like I have a curfew. Go figure. You can go home.