Home is Where You Are

How much greater is the dread than the happening. My efforts paid off—to clean this garden, keeping me bent over (bad), crouched (better), on my knees (best) for a few hours each day over a 10-day period after returning here to Leon County Texas at the end of August. In the course of my labors, I practiced a new mantra—it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t. The garden got as good as it was going to get. After several years of turning over soil shovel full by shovel full, faithful pruning, weeding, watering, mulching, I’m trying to learn to just let it be a half-assed effort. After all, to some eyes, it looks just fine. Rustic, yes, that’s a good word. What Samuel Johnson called an “artful wildness” writing in 18th century England, however, would not apply to my patch of earth on the eastern edge of central Texas. My rusticana just looks neglected to my eyes. But that’s getting more and more okay. Six weeks have passed, and the nut and crab grass have had their way again.

Last Saturday, wiling down the hours as the Round Top Antiques Fair was drawing to a close, I told a couple of other dealers on the floor that I would be making another run at my garden before heading back to Santa Fe. “Why?” one of them asked, a guy still in his 20s, probably not a gardener. “You’re just going to have to clean it again come winter.” “Hmph,” I grunted, “you’re right.” I’ll just save myself some sweat and time, and some sore back, a back that’s been on a tear anyway since I arrived here six weeks ago. Bending (bad) and packing, loading, unloading, unpacking, repacking, loading, unloading—all for Round Top—has taken some toll and prompted me to ask my sister Joan to bring me a bottle of acetiminaphen from Wal-Mart yesterday. That trailer load of tired inventory I hauled to auction two days ago didn’t do me any favors, even though it feels mighty good to see more of the concrete floor on the back of barn.

Gardens in some state of neglect, barn sheds still over populated with things all brought here by a self-confessed stuff magnet, trying to accept, to feel it in my gut and bones, that my 60% level of achievement is somehow tolerable, let me learn to like it. As I stow the leftovers, sweep where I can move a broom, get down on my knees (best) with mop bucket and sponge, fire up the Kirby, stack, arrange—hoping, hoping that some three months down the road, when I get back again it will all make some kind of sense to me, I keep sighing ever so often. “You’re going to have your work cut out for you when you have to vacate this place,” more than one person has pointed out to me. “I know, I know,” I say, but I’ll do what I have to do, in that eventuality. In the meantime, I’ll just keep chipping away at it, doing the next right thing, even it’s just moving packing blankets from one stack to another, a better stack. Yeah, that makes more sense.

When I walked in the door of this barn/house at the end of August, I was surprised to discover that my efforts to give some reasonable order to this place before leaving for four months had somehow succeeded. Whether I’m achieving such success as I prepare to head back to the high plateau, to the golden Aspen at 10,000 feet that beckon, to friendships in progress that are calling me “home”—“Where is home,” I questioned myself, as I visited with friend Randy on the eve of my departure for Texas. “It’s where you are,” he offered. Some might say about this barn and these gardens that it looks like no one lives here. Yes, someone does still call this place home. I have been reminded. The wind chimes answering the breezes on this sunny October day, the family of crows lecturing one another outside the room where I sit, the wheelbarrow-shovel-rake, waiting for me to resume my sense making, they tell the story. My work here is not done.

Home is Where You Are—Normangee, Texas (October 10, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis