All the things that make home
The Wal-Mart checkout lady couldn’t contain herself.
“Cleaning out the garage?” she cheerfully inquired, banging her barcode reader 28 times against the huge plastic tub on top of 27 others just like it.
“Nope,” I replied.
She banged some more.
“Growing a container garden?”
Nope.”
22, 23, 24…
Finally I took pity on her.
26, 27…
“I’m moving. Camping, actually.”
“How long?” she asked, whacking the Tupperware box one last time.
“A while,” I replied, and peeled out of her lane like Danica Patrick grabbing the Indy 500 lead.
We are gypsies now, my husband and me and the dog. The night before we moved out of our sold house I lay in bed staring through the little skylight counting stars, as I had nearly every night for the five years we lived there. Under the vaulted ceiling, I was safe in a place where I felt I belonged.
But not for long; our timing is bad. Our new, smaller home is still stacked in metal-banded piles all over an empty lot. Thousands of dollars worth of two-by-fours, six-by-eights and glue-laminated beams have yet to be hammered and nail-gunned into a new sanctuary that will embrace our future hopes and cushion our disappointments.
Unless we get a miracle in our zero-vacancy rental market we’ll be homeless in seven weeks, when absent friends reclaim their house. Our shelter options are a tent tarp or a tarpaper roof on a cobbled-together temporary shed between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.
Just thinking about camping in the dark, in downpours, surrounded by centipedes, makes my stomach turn over. Nobody’s giving out merit badges for this endurance test.
Holed up for now in a friend’s borrowed house, I lecture myself that the end justifies the means, that I’m not a sissy, that I need to get a grip and keep my sense of humor, that living out of doors under the stars (and in the rain) will be an adventure, not an ordeal.
To fortify myself, I’m packing some treasures to take with me; 28 plastic tubs full.
First, I put in my ET stuffed animal, because its favorite word is “home.” Then I added my ceramic piggybank so I can keep robbing it to buy cookies at the store.
My husband packed his harmonica, ukulele, and iPod; a sack full of mismatched socks; an ancient baseball bat to scare away burglars (who wants to steal Tupperware?); three yoyos; every pair of tennis shoes he’s ever owned; and his favorite pillow.
Of course I know that a home is much more than a collection of things: it’s the love I share with my husband, and the companionship of a good pet. Still, I continue to whine – “How will I cook? How will I keep clothes clean? How will my husband grade papers in the dark?” — and that big one –“will anybody see me when I go to the bathroom?” My friends, who are cozily tucked under their own insulated roofs, offer empty platitudes about “communing with nature” and “getting in touch with your roots.”
My husband tries to reassure me. “You loved ‘Out of Africa’. Pretend you’re on safari.” I remind him he is not Robert Redford, I am not Meryl Streep and our reality is not their movie; we do not have a dozen servants trekking ahead to cook dinner and put Mozart on the Victrola.
Come August, instead of circling the wagons, we’ll be circling the Tupperware tubs, cooking on a barbeque, eating out of coolers full of soggy food in melting ice, bathing in a galvanized wash tub, and trekking ourselves off to the portable potty.
When it’s time to go to sleep, I’ll hold tight to ET and whisper “home.”
(Tad Bartimus is an Associated Press reporter and a syndicated columnist.)