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The Crowded Acre – My Native Home

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by Jennifer Welch “My native home is a certain type of labor, it is a certain type of relationship to my body and the uses and functions of my mind, it is a certain type of relationship to my environment, especially the land and space around me and in which I move and work, it …

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Home

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By John Mattingly

My father built the house where I and my two younger brothers grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. By built I mean from basement stemwall to the kitchen cabinets. With occasional help from Harry and Gene, men my father worked with at Heath Engineering (now the Sundance Saloon on Highway 14 east of Fort Collins), my father did everything from excavation to electrical, framing to roofing, plaster to plumbing, floor covering to cabinets. We even had a fireplace. Father built the house in one spring and summer, mostly in hours after work and on weekends.

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Home – by John Mattingly

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My father built the house where I and my two younger brothers grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. By built I mean from basement stemwall to the kitchen cabinets. With occasional help from Harry and Gene, men my father worked with at Heath Engineering (now the Sundance Saloon on Highway 14 east of Fort Collins), my father did everything from excavation to electrical, framing to roofing, plaster to plumbing, floor covering to cabinets. We even had a fireplace. Father built the house in one spring and summer, mostly in hours after work and on weekends.

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From the Editor – Home

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Where thou art, that is home. – Emily Dickinson

This new year 2012 begins right here, at home. I decided to ask our regular contributors – and some new voices – to interpret their thoughts on “home” for this issue. What you’re about to discover are a variety of stories, memories, opinions, essays, artwork and poetry on an elusive topic for which everyone has some experience and thoughts on. Home isn’t necessarily where you were born or where you currently hang your hat. Home can be a longing, a state of mind, a place of tranquility or a place of contention. Where thou art …

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Loving Homes

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By Lum Pennington

Where, and what, exactly is home?

Like many people I have had a multitude of homes. “Home” has been a moving target, catapulting around the country driven by employment, curiosity and happenstance.

Destined by birth to have affection for New England’s many charming and unique attributes, I left home nonetheless. The region’s stark architecture, its winding, sun-dappled roads; these things feel right and familiar, along with ancient stonewalls running through mature forests that were once the open fields of homesteads, cider mills bustling with activity in the fall, the smell of my grandmother’s kitchen, and a favorite aunt who taught me to eat nasturtiums.

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Winging It Home

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 By Eduardo Rey Brummel

A junior college in Dallas. Me, outside, taking a study break with a just-bought bag of cheddar goldfish to feed the campus geese. I pour a handful; offer them to the nearest goose. There’s hesitation and tentativeness. One goose-step shakily segues into others. I hold myself steady when the first ticklish peck pincers a cracker. Not five minutes later, I’m surrounded by a gazillion geese, each loudly insisting on being fed.

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Down on the Ground and At Home

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By George Sibley

“Home is where one starts from.” – T.S. Eliot

When the publisher of this journal suggested we contributing authors contemplate the topic of “home” for the new year’s first issue, it got the brain to firing on most of its cylinders. Partly because this is frequent topic of conversation between my partner and me. At home, as it were, which is most basically wherever we are at the end of the afternoon when we can sit down together with a beer, a bowl of popcorn, and (in season) a fire.

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I Live in a Caboose

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By Forrest Whitman

I’ve spent a lot of my adult life sleeping, eating, and working in cabooses. These days I live in a grounded Burlington Caboose. It’s located near mile post 41.77 on the Moffat Tunnel Sub. That’s the former D, & R..G.W. (“dangerous and rapidly growing worse line” as we used to joke). Today that main line is owned by the Union Pacific, but is jointly used by the B.N.S.F., a consolidation of three lines including the former Burlington. The logo on the side stills says “C.B. & Q – Route of he Zephyrs.” It was purchased for $100 when the Burlington sold off many of its old wooden heavyweights. The buyer was a fellow named Woody who’s now a resident of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where my Dad, my hobo uncle Wen, and all good dogs go.

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Home

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By Ed Quillen

What “home” means to you often depends on where you grew up. For me, growing up in high and dry Colorado, “HOMES” was a mnemonic, a memory aid, for remembering the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Even though they were hundreds of miles away, we were expected to learn them in grade-school geography.

But Martha, who grew up in Michigan, had never heard of HOMES for the Great Lakes. There, she said, “you just know the names of the Great Lakes. Kind of like you Colorado kids just knew that Elbert and Massive were the state’s two highest peaks.”

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Longing for New Orleans

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By Ann Marie Swan
Life has a way of moving us along, and it’s taken me far from my hometown, New Orleans. This surprises me because I always assumed I’d be back home by now, taking my place in this city of misrule.

I adore New Orleans. It’s a mixed bag of excitement and heartbreak, lovely yet exasperating. At times, it feels like urban transcendence despite deep pockets of poverty and crime.

New Orleans has that rich, earthy smell of a place in a constant state of decay. The swamps try to reclaim the city, seeping up through it, buckling her sidewalks and roads.

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