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.