My Home, Our Home

I was awake before the sun came up over the levee that ran next to the Seagram’s whiskey plant. That was my front yard. We lived in an upstairs apartment next to a bar only a few feet from US-50. The front parking lot was an old minivan that belonged to my parents. I had gotten permission to use it for the whole day, and I intended for it to be a big one.

I crossed the Ohio into Kentucky and rode 275 until it carried me back across the river into Ohio. I passed Coney Island and climbed up Sutton and made my way into Anderson Township where Emily Mayer lived. For a poor kid like me, she lived in the lap of luxury. Back then those houses looked huge. I parked in front of the house and as I walked to the front door she opened it. The world’s most beautiful smile shined on me from a face covered in freckles and a few strands of reddish-brown hair. I asked if she was ready. She was. I held her hand as I walked her toward what was nearly a death trap of a vehicle. I opened the door like a good gentleman and back out to 275 we went.

We went over the Ohio, through Kentucky, back into Indiana, past my high school and deeper into the rolling hills and over the endless creeks. Emily and I had met at a Bible study I taught in her neighborhood. We became fast friends. My family had somehow gotten our phone turned off for quite some time. The only way I could talk to her was to drop quarters into a payphone. There were still a few around back then. That got expensive, so I bought a bunch of stamps and we started writing letters back and forth. It turned into well over a hundred letters.

About six months after we met, I got the guts to tell her I was interested in dating her. I was shocked to find out she was interested in being dated by me. We fell in love fast. And now I really wanted her to know me. And what better way than to show her where I was from.

I was kind of from a lot of places… Greensburg, Bloomington, Lawrenceburg, Osgood. I had mostly grown up in small Indiana towns, but the place I thought of as my own was my grandmother’s farm in Ripley County off what today is called Mud Creek Road.

It had been a while since I’d been out there, at least a couple years. My grandmother had moved to Salina, Kansas in the mid-90s and sold the farm. It crushed me. I had hoped it would stay in the family and be mine one day. When I was a small child I had been sent to live with my grandmother, and it became a defining experience. At the time my family was in Kansas City. I traded the sound of cars passing by for crickets. It turned out crickets could be louder.

There I learned about chickens and cows and horses and farming. I learned about an ordered way of life. I was disciplined faithfully by my grandfather and I had so much freedom. There were ponds and lakes and creeks to explore. I would flip over bricks to gather worms and catch crickets so I could go fishing and fill a bucket with bluegill. Sometimes I would chase the cows around until Grandpa made me go collect potato bugs off the potato plants. I never stopped feeling at home there. This was where I came to understand most of the world. And if Emily was going to understand me, she needed to know this place at least a little.

As we drove down Mud Creek Road, everything was a landmark.

“See that gas station there? We used to get a Coke for twenty-five cents. We always stopped there before going to the swimming pool at Versailles State Park.”

“That there is my great-aunt Alice’s old pig farm. I’m not sure who owns it now.”

“And that’s the Damm Theater. It was owned by a woman named Virginia Damm. We all thought that was hilarious. For some reason my parents let me go there by myself in second or third grade to see the movie Big.”

Believe it or not, Emily listened to every story with a smile and deep interest. It was good to be loved.

Before long we pulled into the driveway. It was a beautiful late-spring day. Probably the very end of May, maybe early June. Either way the sky was blue and the flowers were in full bloom. I walked up to the front door, gathering the courage to explain who I was and hoping they’d give me permission to walk the property.

Nobody was home. I decided they wouldn’t mind.

There was an old friend waiting there. Apparently the people who bought the farm had kept my grandparents’ dog, a half-breed mostly husky named Prince. Who knows how old he was. He was old, but it seemed like he still remembered me.

I was excited to show Emily the trees. There was one right along Mud Creek Road I used to climb. I’d sit up in it and look way down the gravel road when I thought I heard Grandma’s car. In the country you could hear a car coming from miles away. I would stand there like a lookout waiting for her to return home. She almost always brought some sort of snack.

Then I showed her the huge catalpa tree. It had a piece of an old rusted train rail stuck in it. It had been there since I was a kid and the legend was that a tornado had driven it into the tree. I have no clue if that was true or not, but it always felt a little mystical to me.

I showed her my grandmother’s garden. The new owners hadn’t kept it up very well. “Here’s where I used to sneak pieces of rhubarb and chew on it while I fished in the back pond.”

I was blown away to see a cinder block still sitting in the middle of the barnyard just where I had left it sometime back in the 80s. I used to flip it over to find worms.

I took her into the back woods and showed her where we had taken the enclosure of an old dryer and turned it into a little clubhouse by a tree. It was still there.

This was me. This is who I am. This was my home. If we were going to build a home together, she needed to understand this. And she was eager to.

It was hard to leave that day. But there was not much more to show her. I missed my grandmother. By that day, she had been dead for over two years. This was no longer her home. Neither was it mine anymore. But it was the pattern of the kind of home I hoped for.

Across the street along Mud Creek were some roses my grandmother had planted. They were in full bloom. I always thought of Emily as a red rose. I asked her to stand by them with her Bible and I took a picture.

I love that picture.

As I write this now, she is in our backyard with a young mother showing her our garden on our property off a country road.

This is our home.