“Once more” is what my father used to say when pulling up at the front door with some of all of his family inside. He would stop the car, turn off the key, and I would always wait a moment for him to say it. Then we would all climb out and head inside, once more.
I just got home (to Craig) from two months in a faraway part of Alaska. It was 75 degrees and bright sun there, and it’s fifty and raining here, but I’m ok with that. This is where I live. My mom and I, we both love the rain.
My cat waited for me, too, as a bonus. Her age is such that as I was leaving two months ago, I felt obliged to make a special request: please be here when I get home. She has been kind enough to oblige me, and even though I’ve been home two whole days she shows no sign of peeling off the planet. In fact, as soon as I sat down, she crawled right up on my shoulder, with a minimum of the wandering around and squalling that so endears her to the family. Other than the occasional field trip to drink rainwater on the front porch, she prefers to gain her warmth from a living human (I flatter myself that she “loves” me), and only moves off when said human gets too ambitious in getting the rats’ nests out of her fur.
“Home” is such a weird word. In Aniak, I would leave the school and go “home” to my rented apartment. When leaving Aniak, I mentioned that I was going “home” to Craig. When I leave Craig to visit family in Virginia, I explain that I am going “home” for a few weeks. I suppose it is a term that exists only in a relative sense. If it were more concrete and absolute, we would probably have fewer poems and country songs on the topic.
One person who never seemed confused about the concept was my mother. Once she settled into the farm in Virginia, having spent her childhood moving around for her father’s job changes, she was apparently satisfied. She was fond of saying that she would go anywhere in the world, provided she could be home in time for dinner.
But as for me, I like the idea that no matter where I am, I can always go home, at least once more.
He would also say, when one of his daughters was leaving alone on a car trip, “Point it straight.” I always had to resist the impertinent impulse to say “Unless the road curves.”
PS, Are my periods inside the final quotations marks, grammatically correct? I feel that I learned they must go inside, even though it is not logical.
I am glad you are truly home.
Maybe we would be pointing it straight through curved space, like the orbit of a planet?? (Physics joke!) I think the punctuation thing is correct, not because it makes particular sense, but because it looks really weird with the period on the outside.
Believe it or not, that is one thing (where the period is placed) that I have argued with students about.
As one does. 😉
I would sometimes go “poke the fire”. Come back up stairs, count to three,and he’d say “is the fire doing ok?”
Mary, I also remember your scolding Mama for making Daddy feel bad once when she said the house feels chilly. You said, “Mama! Don’t say that! He thinks he has failed as husband and father and fire-maker.”
Yes, he would go stomping down the stairs with a great mumbling and rattling of the poker.