Home is feet. You can trod millions of miles all over this great green earth, but your feet are still your feet. Smooth or cracked, they’re still your feet. They take you everywhere you need to go. You start from your feet, you start from home.
Many people don’t have a place they consider home. I do. As much as I could wish it be somewhere else, maybe even making one with the person I love, it’s still here. I won’t say which town, but I live in southwest New York state, near the PA border. The Southern Tier. It’s rural and absolutely lovely.
I went to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade. I know almost every person’s name I graduated with. Our class had maybe fifty people? So that makes it easy. But I also grew up with most of them. I rode the bus with them, I sat in class with them. These people are family.
Sometimes I think I need to get out of here. Wanderlust and a desire to make my own life again nips at me frequently. But I came here to get back on my feet in many ways, and I am. I will leave again. Though while I’m here, I might as well look around.
Our rusty red house is nestled along a stretch of dirt road. We moved there from down the road when I was eleven. You can’t see it until you are almost upon it. My parents plant a garden every year. A flower bed is near the mailbox. Half of the house is edged by the woods, the other half by sunlight. I love when it rains at night, because I hear the rain accompanied by nature sounds. I fall asleep to that song.
Our home is a rectangle, nothing fancy. It has an adjoining greenhouse, which is heaped with stuff. Snakes used to slither in, leaving their skins.
There is also the aforementioned deck, a square of sunlight and leafy shade.
When you first enter the house, there is a mudroom. This is where you take off your shoes and coat. An old cookstove squats in the corner. The rest of the house is pretty straightforward, and I’m not going to write about its structure. Value lies in what fills that structure.
It’s presently mostly a mishmash of my mother’s fancies, a curiosity shop of stuff she has collected over the years. I’ve mentioned that she buys and resells collectibles. Well, the house runneth over. Not entirely. We can all move around pretty well! I think my mother’s idea of heaven is a gigantic fleamarket in the sky.
When I was a little girl and living in the trailer, Mom packed a picnic lunch for us to take to Dad while he was haying. We’d sit on the scratchy shorn straw and eat white-bread sandwiches, cantalope, and Mom’s potato salad. I was a picky child and never ate that salad. I love it now. Here it is:
Mom’s Potato Salad
Boil 8-10 unpeeled yukon gold or butter potatoes until tender, but not mushy.
Fry 6 bacon strips at the same time, remove, and reserve the fat in the pan. Fry 1 or 2 chopped onions in the fat.
Add 2/3 cup of cider vinegar and 2/3 cup of sugar. Shake in some salt and pepper. Stir and add in torn bits of cooked bacon.
Let it sit. Peel and cut potatoes into pieces about the size of your big toe. Add the potatoes and bacon mixture back to the pot, folding in the mixture (be careful not to mushify). Heat on low, mix a little more and serve.
Homey goodness.
