Home (part one)

The wind weaves through the trees, its sigh throaty, and I am at home with the voice of the Catskills.

This is not my home, per se. The structure and I are not intimates, not like the house on South Jefferson that my grandfather sold to my parents, where I found the panda bear that would become that one toy - you know the one, Hobbes to my Calvin - where the basement was creepy and I knew every crack in the sidewalk in the back yard.

Nor is it the house on Prospect Avenue, where I inhabited the entire third floor and spent hours hacking away on the Olympia typewriter my father supplied for term papers in those primative pre-computer days.

This is the house my mother bought after the divorce, nestled away in the trees in Palenville, overlooking the Hudson Valley. A gaze off the ledge and you understand Thomas Cole's artistic motivation. Yet I have no strong personal connection to the structure other than it's Mom's house. Home, yet not, but still.

It's been several months since my last visit, so long (he said shamefully) that I actually don't remember my last visit. Was it after Thanksgiving, or before? I know it was during my final semester of grad school, when I was researching Aunt Elaine's life for my final memoir paper - Aunt Elaine, who called this buiding on the ledge home when my mother invited her in when Elaine was low on options. Too long between visits. Life is spinning so quickly there's a hum. And May is no slower. Nor June.

But tonight, there is the quiet of Greene County wilderness, just the wind through the trees, and a calmness inside, a silence in my head. And though it isn't my room atop the old Chase manor, or the small two story across from Tony's Tavern, it's Mom's place and by definition for me, I'm home.