Moving Home

I'm currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams in stolen hours. I swear Kingsolver writes for a reader like me--one who is going to spend the time to really taste all of the images and themes, like rolling a piece of sugar-coated chocolate in your mouth instead of just chewing. Either that or she just can't help but write dense poetry every few pages, even when she's trying to write a novel. This is why it's taken me a month to get to this point in the book, and I'm only on page 235. This is not a complaint.



In the story Loyd is a Pueblo-Apache man with a half-coyote dog. At one point he explains that Apaches are wanderers and Pueblo are homebodies. Cosima, the point of view character, asks him which he is. Without hesitation, he says Pueblo. When he turns the question on her, Cosima makes a joke about how her friend once called her a "home-ignorer." It is pretty clear that Cosima is at least in her mind a wanderer. But ultimately she is neither. Home for her isn't the apartment she keeps now or the life of transitions and moving; home isn't in any of the versions of herself she's created over the years.  For some reason she feels she isn't worthy or capable of home.


On an early date, Loyd and Cosima visit some "ancient condos" of adobe,  and eventually during Christmas, the couple stay at Loyd's mother's home on the Pueblo reservation and watch the all-day dancing festival from the rooftop. I love how the architecture of houses, both literal and figurative, is such a diverse and detailed observation of Kingsolver's in this book. Cosima has been planning to leave since before she arrived--one year of teaching biology at the high school and she's out. Loyd sees this attitude as part of her life's pattern of running to something (which will inevitably not be the perfection for which you search) instead of creating it wherever you go. On the rooftop between watching the dancers in the village below, Cosima points out some adobe houses in a state of collapse:


[The following dialogue is pulled from a delicate weave of pacing which I didn't want to recreate here--sorry Kingsolver.]


C: How come those houses over there near the edge of the cliff are falling down?
L: Because they're old.
C: Thank you. I mean, why doesn't somebody fix them up? You guys are the experts, you've been building houses for nine hundred years.
L: Not necessarily in the same place. This village was in seven other places before they built it here.
C: So when something gets old they just let it fall down?
L: Sometimes. Some day you'll get old and fall down.
C:Thanks for reminding me.
L: The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground. That's where everything comes from in the first place.
C: But then you've lost your house.
L: Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba--people lived in them awhile, and then they'd move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something.
C: I thought they were homebodies.
L: The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go...We're like coyotes, get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.


In the book, this gets Cosima recognizing her own rationalizations as such for leaving at the end of the school year. In my life, it makes me think about the places I've lived since I left my mother's house. In this way, I relate to Cosima. If you were to look at the record of residences I'd have to put down in applying for a lease, you would most likely call me a wanderer. 

• I graduated college and moved back to my mother's place in May, 2004. 
• In July I drove what I could carry in my car and moved to Bethesda, MD, into a group house with 3 men. 
• 7 months later, I moved again, to a grad student apartment with a friend.
• 8 months later, we moved into a DC apartment, closer to school.
• 7 months later, we split up and both got our own apartments within the same building.
• 8 months later, I moved back to Maryland, into an apartment with another friend.
• 7 months later, my friend's woman was moving in with her--which meant I moved out of that apartment and into another in the same complex.
• 1 year later, I moved to Long Island. 
• This summer, I will move again, after nearly two years here, in the same apartment.

In a span of 6 years, I will have moved 9 times and that's counting the 2-years of staying in one place. I can relate to Cosima, but I am not her. I feel her ease with moving and mine are of two different energies. I don't see any of my moves, except maybe the 3rd, as a "running away" from something. And, perhaps unlike Cosima, I do truly feel I've been at home in these places (except the 7th). I carry home in my brain and in my hands. I may move more frequently than others, but I don't wander. 


And yet, the large summer move coming up is a scary one. It will be the first time I move for which my plans aren't completely solid. Yes, I already know where I'm moving to--I know which town, the physical building; I know it will be a new space with D, a kitten, a colder winter, a place with good cheese. I know all of this, and I know I will feel at home when I am in our apartment. But what I don't know yet is what Cosima does--she moves when and where she has work. She moves back to Grace--her childhood town--to check on her ailing father and teach at the high school for a year when the school is desperate for someone. I understand this type of moving. It is indeed the type of move that D is doing. But for me, this move will not be for work. Right now, without the promise of work, it is a move solely for love, for happiness. 


I think I am not the only one who has nerves about this kind of move. American idealism may say freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but US culture says be street smart, have financial security, make decisions based on logic not emotion. In my heart of hearts, I believe that D and I will be together for a long time to come. I know that she is my favorite person and my favorite place. I know that I am hers as well. We already live together. There is nothing to indicate that moving this summer will change any of these things. But no one can read the future. And this is why Cosima is truly scared of staying in one place, making it work with Loyd. She is scared that what she loves will disappear. She speaks about a recurring nightmare wherein she hears a loud pop and is suddenly blind. She comes to realize that this dream is not just about losing her sight, but about her context. One chapter closes with "What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all." Moving for something ethereal as joy, or in Cosima's situation not moving, is scary because it has no set shape. We cannot map its perimeter or its parameter. 

Fish Lover

I'll admit it. I'm attached to my goldfish, Guy. [Disclaimer: the fish actually started as my partner's alone, but it came to stay with me one summer and then of course, I came to stay with him when I moved in with my partner a year later.] He's got a great personality. He recognizes our voices when we come home and knows when to act cute so we second-guess ourselves about if he's already eaten. (He likes to eat, a lot. Note picture of tiny Guy, followed by picture of Guy now.)

Most people who have experience with cats or dogs or other furry creatures you can hug or hold in your arms don't  understand how people become attached to fish. People assume correctly that it is harder to build a connection with something you can't touch--so much of the traditional idea of intimacy in our lives comes from our experience of touch sensation. However, I think if we thought about it a little longer we would also agree that many of us have the ability to create intimacy without touch. If you've ever started a relationship with the help of online networking sites, or if you've ever sustained a long distance relationship with family or a love interest, then you know it isn't all about touch.

I don't have romantic feelings for my fish, by the way. But I have been observing him, caring for him, watching him grow for nearly two years. He has certainly become a part of the life I live with D.  We enjoy trying to persuade him of who his better "mom" is almost daily. There was a point last year when we weren't on a good communication schedule about his feeding, and he got too big around the middle to swim between the side of his tank and the black filter tube and cut himself. The glowing red wound in the middle of his iridescent body scales reminded me of the animated Hobbit movie from the 70s. It looked like that one weak area on the soft underside of the dragon. I wondered if something else hit him there before he healed if it would be the end. I wondered if he would have the wound for a long time and whether or not fish wounds get infected. The scale grew back but it's a few shades lighter than the rest, evidence of his battle.

Then there was this random weeknight when I was sitting on the couch and D was working at the table on classwork when Guy was playing with his rocks--literally--and sucked one back into his throat. I looked over and his mouth was open wider than I'd ever seen it, his gills were pumping hard. He was choking and there was nothing I could do about it. I had the urge to put my hand in there and try some form of the Heimlich Maneuver.  In 30 seconds or so, he'd managed to work it out himself and was back to his usual swimming. It was one of the most anxiety-ridden moments of my life. Watching him struggle gave me a flashback to the time when my parents were out of town and our dog Ginger had pneumonia and collapsed in my arms.

So, you can imagine that a week or so ago, when we realized Guy's tank filtration system wasn't working anymore, we were concerned and planned to get him a new system and/or new tank asap. We put him in the new tank last Sunday, and he seemed delighted--his usual outgoing self, showing off for our friends who'd come over to hang out. But Tuesday when we came home we found him not swimming but resting at the bottom of his tank, not wanting to move or eat. I thought he'd be dead within a few hours. So we took the new tank, rocks, filtration system, and plants back to store, not knowing exactly what the problem was/is. Guy is still alive, now Friday, but his tail and fins have started bleeding and deteriorating. What was once a much larger fin with soft, rounded edges like sugar cookie dough rolled out is now scallopped with loss, as if someone came along the edge with a cookie cutter and took deep cresent-shaped bites out of it. He has been living in the large bucket that is usually only a temporary home for tank cleanings. I don't know which is more difficult at this point: knowing that it must have been something I did in the set-up of the new tank that made him sick or having to watch his fins bleed and unravel before our eyes, slowly, without answers or solutions.

On top of these issues though, it sucks that Guy is a fish because I used to be one of those people who didn't get it, so I assume that when I tell people I'm sad about him, that they are rolling their eyes on the inside because I used to do that. I am different now. I am a fish lover.

Spring Relationshi[t] Reprise

One of my friends recently wrote an article about being dumped in the spring, which made me reminisce to an earlier time in my life, a time when I too went through a break-up during spring. She had been a grad-school roommate for a moment before we started dating. She became my first live-in girlfriend, and the split was messy. Right before she had started dating me, though, she had met someone online and gone on a date or two with the woman, a woman with whom she would later really hit it off.