We are Vermonters now, my Gay Old Soulmate and I. We are not Vermonters like people who have lived here their entire lives. We hope to someday be Vermonters like those who moved here long ago. But already we are Vermonters in the sense that we want to be here and we have no other home.
I left being a Kansan somewhere early in the queer revolution. I don’t know if I left Kansas or Kansas left me. At some point my body began to know it as a hostile state. Continue reading
I step off the train into Brattleboro’s darkness. It is 5:00 o’clock, but the sun had set before we reached Greenfield. I cross the road and head up Main Street. My briefcase hangs on a strap around my neck. I lift the bag of lunches (food for more than two) packed by Ruth and Beth. And I pull my suitcase behind me. What little traffic has backed up on Main disappears quickly once the train clears the crossing. I am left alone, trudging up the steep sidewalk. Dark store windows follow my progress. Even the restaurants have closed for Thanksgiving.
For reasons too tedious to enumerate, my Gay Old Soulmate and I headed different directions at Thanksgiving this year. I, back to our new home here in Brattleboro. But since I’ve only lived here a week, it doesn’t feel quite like coming home.
The sun has fallen behind the trees as my Gay Old Soulmate and I sit here on the deck in our little queer retreat cottage. If all goes well, we soon will leave behind the house we have lived in for twenty-seven years in the city we have lived in for thirty-two. We will move to a different house in a different town a few miles away from where we sit now.
Only an occasional bird call or distant dog’s bark breaks the silence. My soul has lived in unsettled quiet for some time now. Continue reading
We are home, my Gay Old Soulmate and I. And there is no one to call. No number to dial. No one to pick up the phone at the other end and hear my report, “we’re back home in Philadelphia” (really meaning, “we’re safely home”). Mom is dead.
We three sons were with her when she died. Although she suffered little pain, the cancer that killed her made much of her last months miserable. She had complained several times that she didn’t understand why dying had to take so long. She was ready. And we readily released her. Hers had been a good life, a full life. I won’t say it was a good ending—but it wasn’t a bad one. And now she no longer lives there, back home, in Kansas. I find it hard to wrap my head around the absence, much less my heart.
My father died in 1992 after a long, pain-filled struggle with prostate cancer. About three months later, my Gay Old Soulmate and I were awakened by a call informing us that my uncle had also died—unexpectedly of a heart attack. Since he and his family lived about an hour’s drive from us, Mom (still grieving my father’s death) flew out immediately to Philadelphia to spend time with my aunt. My Gay Old Soulmate and I had also rushed to my aunt’s house when we heard the news. So when Mom arrived to stay in our guest room, I apologized that we had not properly cleaned the house in preparation.
“My house is always clean,” she replied. “No one lives there anymore.”
That quiet sentence, a vessel of bottomless absence, pierced my heart then. It has forever since, each time I recall the words. And now, it comes back to me more achingly deep than ever, because, we have made it home, and there is no one to call.
I dream a dusty path
where cattle obliterate the grass,
making their routine pilgrimages
past a looming red barn
through weedy green pastures
to a creek’s still waters.
I never lived here,
a generation removed
from where I grew up
playing town-kid games,
seeing fields and pastures
only as a wilderness for imagination.
Fence posts mark a corner
where a barbed-wire crown dangles
half-wrapped back upon itself,
and dense hedge trees with their own barbs
grow lime-green apples
as rough as a farmer’s hands.
Distant from the farm
as from the gardens
that bracket my salvation,
I dream it as a sacred painting
an idealized icon
shining on my path.
I frame that glistening dream
now foreign to my life
and hang it as a blessing
to grace my older days,
like Jesus in the garden
or knocking at the door.
For three days following her funeral
I have been desperate to be home
overanxious to putter in my own kitchen
to doze off in my own bed
Now the day to leave has come
My back clings to this mattress
stretching out the minutes
If we don’t rise, we won’t have to go
Her reflection fades already
in the transformation of this place
as we sort her things
deciding their fate
This house will not be hers again
nor frame her presence for us
Departing requires that someday
we come back to her absence
*My Gay Old Soulmate’s mother (my mother-in-law) died in mid-March. We had been gone from our home for a month and a half on various aspects of family business when she died. An amazing woman, she had prepared us well and she was ready to make the transition from life and flesh. In multiple respects, we were ready to go. But the reality that she is no longer there will come home to us for a long time. I wrote the words above on the day we left her home in Kansas to return to ours in Philadelphia.