Home is Where the Heart Is

Now that I’m back here in Texas, I’m trying not to use the “H” word because I like pretending that I live in Santa Fe New Mexico. Hah! Given my long developing love of sprawl, the one that has evolved into this barn and garden on steroids, I’m hard pressed to explain to anyone who might care to ask, exactly where is your home? Can it possibly be that a postage stamp-sized condo measures up to a home? Is a treasure-filled barn home? Well, I can quote scripture: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21). “Home is where the heart is,” goes an old saying. I’ve just been reminded by someone posting on an Internet website, “…my home is my parents' old house. I've never loved my own…” as much.

Our middle sister, Sue, lives in the house we mostly grew up in. I was already 10 when that house was built, Joan, the oldest, 15. It was moved some 25 miles west back in the early 70s when our parents sold the land on which it sat. It had already been moved once, from one side of the road to the other when the highway was widened my senior year in high school. Even then it hadn’t been home to my sisters for some time. The youngest of three, I lived at this new site for only a few months before heading off to college. In its new place, that house has been the scene of many family gatherings. Sue’s children, now all in their 40s, were in their teens when their Paw Paw died. The house here on this land in Leon County, home to Mother and Daddy for a few years in the late ‘70s—the house where both our Grandma Fuchs and Mother died—is now Joan’s home. The only guarantee we have is change.

My other memories of hearth—the house at 102 Arnold in an old Houston neighborhood, a house built by our maternal grandparents in 1923, and the house built by great Uncle Henry at 105 Reinerman, just around the corner—the house where an historic photograph has recorded great grandmother Louisa Benfer Fuchs laid out for burial in January 1939, the first time she had been in a reclining position in years, having long been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. We lived in each of those houses in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. There’s a picture of Sue and me in front of the garage at 102 Arnold, one of us holding the family rat Terrier. Today, through some freak accident, Joan’s rat Terrier, Sadie, fell victim under the wheels of the diesel Ford driven by the contractor remodeling the old bathroom of my barn home. We cried, “the only watchdog on the place,” Joan lamented, and Sadie was buried in my oldest sister’s pet cemetery, just beyond the clothesline, under a cedar tree. There’s Joan, Sue and me, along with Mother and family friend Jim Hulme, shown in a late 1940s Houston Press photo with Lassie our collie and her 13 puppies, alongside the house at 105 Reinerman. What are we to do with all of these changes?

My sisters and I are gathering here on the land in Leon County, both to visit all together for the first time in several months—now that I pretend to live in northern New Mexico—and to conduct our little family business. How keen the memory of Grandma Fuchs, from whom this land was a gift to Mother and Daddy in the early ‘70s, and before her, land to land to land, a gift from Louisa Benfer Fuchs. As our mother and her sister-in-law, our Aunt Edna, did so often in the final years of Mother’s life, last night my sisters and I reminisced a little, gossiped a little. We ate chili and beans over cornbread. Our cousin Mary, Edna’s daughter, is coming for lunch today—chicken and dumplings made by Sue’s daughter, Karen. Food has always been a centerpiece of home, the product of both our German and Scots-Irish heritage.

Recently in Santa Fe, I had lunch with our cousin Donald Hollis, his wife Patsy (Gallegos), whose family has lived in Santa Fe for many generations, and Patsy’s sister, Isabella, who lives in Albuquerque. Donald, the oldest of our generation of Hollises, lived in New Mexico for a relatively short time—from the beginning of his teen years until graduation from university. He returned to his Houston Texas roots four years before I graduated from high school. I loved hearing them talk about growing up in Santa Fe, their family traditions, where they had lived in that sleepy town of the first half of the 20th century. For decades, the Gallegos family compound was near the juncture of Juanita and Agua Fria, not that far from the Plaza. Patsy, of pure New Mexican Hispanic heritage, has now lived most of her life on the Gulf coast of Texas. She and Donald’s children are native Texans, just like their daddy. Their hearts are steeped in Texas.

In New Mexico I am drawn to the persistent call of the ravens that nest in the Pinon pines populating so much of the terrain. Here in Leon County, their crow cousins insist on being heard throughout the day. I associate crows with the pines that dominated the land where I grew up in northwest Harris County, but pines obviously are not requisite to their habitat, as witnessed here in the Post Oak Savannah that lies just a few miles west of the towering pines of East Texas. Studies show that crows and ravens thrive in the woodlands, on the coast, and in the arid west. They migrate to the food. I pay attention to the crows and the ravens, and though I’m not sure of what they tell me, I smile often when I consider what they have on their minds. They are curious by nature, gregarious. They clearly have opinions. So I’m taking their reminder on good faith. Where they are, I find myself smiling as I move toward their presence, feeling very much at home. At the end of the forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark and sent forth a raven. It went to and from until the waters were dried up from the earth. Like the raven and the crow, I make myself at home, wherever I am for a while.

Home is Where the Heart Is—Normangee Texas (February 25, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis