Finding Home: Other Voices

I'm pleased to launch Finding Home: Other Voices, a platform for guest writers to ponder the question: What is home?

To kick off this Thursday series, I know you'll enjoy the work of poet, playwright and author Pamela Hobart Carter.

RAISED AND RAZED 

Only house our children knew, where they were raised,

(only children raised in our old house)—waits to be razed.

Mirror-mantel with mottled green tile will grace

another house. Men will salvage and scavenge

her wood, her radiators. Men will flatten

her asbestos siding, her lath, her plaster.

Men will dig where Edna has stood one hundred

and eleven years. I demark the raising

of my children, their chalk hopscotch on front walk,

their slides in shorts down her grass as if on sleds

in snow, with orange cones. Men cannot raze games:

their hide-and-seek, their chase, their splendid stair-ball

invented for her carpeted risers, nor

careenings on her bannister. They cannot

erase images, the house we added to—

dark built-ins for our books, pale green tiled shower,

closets where she had few, fresh elegant paint,

and a garden we raised in borroweds and blues.

Whetherbe built two yellow quartermasters,

one, at his fort, and ours, on the quiet street.

Ours shimmied from her central axis, windows

skipped a beat, yardstick slipped: aging dowager,

misapplied lipstick sitting crooked across

her smile, unphased. We sold her to be razed.

Seattle resident Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal, Quebec. A geologist by training, Carter has taught everything from preschool to science pedagogy. She practices timed writing with two Seattle groups. Recently Carter began to wield poetry for the purpose of eliminating hunger.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Pamela-Hobart-Carter/e/B006JVX768  

 

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Finding Home: The Shorewood Shack

The Shorewood shack was my parents' first home as newlyweds in 1947. It made my mother's parents cry in dismay. But Dad was undeterred. They had a roof over their heads and land to build on.

Dad poured a foundation, framed, wired, plumbed, and roofed the place. He worked full time and built in his "free time" after putting in his daily shifts as a union steamfitter. I don't know how long it took before the new house stood fresh and shiny on a tiny dead-end street called Marine View Drive, but I know it was sold about six years after Dad broke ground. I have no memory of the original shack, and no idea what became of it. Maybe it became a garden shed. Maybe a garden shop. Maybe they tore it down in celebration.

The Shorewood house was Dad's first construction project. I wonder what a nightmare it must have been for both my parents. Or maybe an adventure? They were young. World War II had ended. Life was full of hope and opportunity. In those first five years of marriage, they had four children and built their first house.

They went on to have nine kids and build seven more houses.

But were they ever homes? What makes a home? A putting down of roots? A sense of belonging to both place and community? I'm hesitant to use the word home. I'm unsure whether any of the houses Dad built were homes. For me, there is a difference. I don't know that such a difference existed for my parents. At times I think their houses were only investments.

Until recently, I’d believed I was carried home from Providence Hospital in my mother's arms to breathe the fresh autumn salt air of Puget Sound, the blue of sea and sky merging on the horizon. Simple mathematics tell me I was wrong.

My older siblings were school-age, when I joined the family as the fifth child, six years behind the first. My folks wanted them close to a quality elementary school. Through sweat equity they'd increased the value of the Shorewood property sufficiently to flip it (in today's parlance) and buy a house in a more desirable area of West Seattle. When my mother carried me home, it was to a craftsman home on Walnut Avenue, not to the newly completed Shorewood house, but more about that next week.

Yet, I have this photo of myself in front of the Shorewood house. I must have been about three. I'm not wearing my glasses, but I hid those whenever I could. My mother rarely dated photographs, and I was too little to remember much at all, but according to family lore the sale of the Shorewood house fell through. Keeping two houses was out of the question, an offer came on the Admiral house, and leaving in Seattle was already under consideration, so my parents packed up the five of us and returned to Shorewood. About a year later we moved into a tent, and another construction zone, in the Issaquah Valley.

Sorting my parents’ belongings after Dad died and Mom was in a dementia care facility, I found the address of that first house. I punched it into the GPS and went exploring. The house is in the Shorewood neighborhood of Burien, not Seattle at all. Although the surrounding area is now completely developed, Dad's original construction still stands on a dead-end street. His house is freshly painted and well-loved, the large-paned windows facing west with a breath-taking view of Puget Sound.

Finding Home: Prologue

My husband and I have a house that is a home. It is a small 1941 "war box" in a community we love in West Seattle. We have remodeled extensively—taking down walls, finishing the basement, and building on a sunroom to add space to an 800 square foot home.

We have lived in this house for twenty four years, raised our daughter here, and shared the joys and sorrows of families around the globe within its walls. I belong to this house and to this community just as they belong to me. I have found my home. But it took time, and it wasn't always easy.

In my sixty years, I've had fifteen or twenty homes, depending on how they're counted. Home is the wrong word. Abodes, shelters, places I slept? These residences include houses my father built; dorm rooms; apartments in Seattle, Santa Cruz, Caracas, Mexico City; even a high-rise restroom during a brief period of homelessness, a time of transition; and now a house that is a home. I have lived here longer than any other place, including my childhood home in the Issaquah Valley nestled at the foot of the Cascade Range where I lived from age four to seventeen.

Home is the place we belong, where our roots run deep. A place where walls, people, and community hold us. For some that sense of belonging, of finding home, is as natural as breathing. For others it can be a lifelong journey. Most of us struggle with belonging, whether as a student in the lunch room of a suburban middle school, as an immigrant in a new land, or as an elder moving into assisted living.

When birth family does not exist, or is insufficient to fill their needs, my Alki Trilogy characters find home by building a family of friends. The third novel of the trilogy, Walking Home, is a story about searching for a place to nourish the soul and provide sanctuary from violence. In celebration of its upcoming publication, I'll be sharing a series of posts exploring my own search for home—the memories and emotions around each of the places I've lived. I hope you'll join me on this journey.

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The Proposal

Many thanks to Tess Thompson for sharing my guest post at Inspiration for Ordinary Life.

Early February 2015

When I walked into the kitchen, I knew something was up. There was tension in the air, electricity. I felt it.

The kitchen is small. Stove to the right. Refrigerator on the left. Sink on the back wall. Husband Tom stood at the stove frying piles of chopped veggies in his favorite cast iron skillet - green zucchinis, purple onions, yellow peppers, red tomatoes.  He focused on building his signature frittata, his back toward our daughter's boyfriend, Elliot, who leaned against the narrow counter space between refrigerator and sink.

"We're not usually together, I mean alone, without Erin," Elliot said when I walked in. "I should've said something sooner."

I heard hesitation, a nervous tone in his voice. "What's up?" I asked, nudging Tom to attention.

Read more ...

Wide Open Spaces

The past two weekends I've headed out of Seattle and crossed the Cascade range to Eastern Washington. Last weekend I was in Ellensburg, this weekend in Spokane.

Ellensburg

My four sisters and I were once all country girls, raised on an Issaquah Valley farm. Now only one of us  lives the farm life with sheep, chickens and a donkey, with wide open spaces, a night sky bright with stars and silence so deep your own breathing can awaken you in the night. It's a life I could not now live, but one I love to dip into every now and again to remember my roots.

We gathered to celebrate a birthday. This is something we've begun doing every few months: five middle-aged women coming together, still learning the changing meaning of life, love and sisterhood.

Spokane

Friend and writing partner, Pamela Hobart Carter, and I drove to the far side of Washington state to present at the Spokane Regional ESL Conference. Another sun-filled, snow-free, gorgeous drive reminded me to get out of the city more often. 

We arrived early enough Friday evening for some exploring around Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane. Saturday morning we went to Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute where I once visited one of my sisters while she completing her degree.

We spoke to a room full of ESL faculty interested in what we have to offer: short books in easy English for adults.

In the late afternoon, I did a signing at the fabulous Auntie's Bookstore. I look forward to returning on May 23rd to do a reading of Walking Home, scheduled for release next month.

The fun thing about signings is the folks you meet. Among others, Pam and I met Nathaniel Banks. When he mentioned he runs a non-profit to fight obesity, Pam pointed out my book titles (Running Secrets, Biking Uphill and Walking Home) and the activities of each of the protagonists. In doing so, she established a link between emotional and physical health in my work I held only on a subconscious level. Wonderful!

Our return to Seattle was as glorious as the drive over: the perfect end to two weekends on the road.