A few years after my aunt’s death, I followed a visceral longing for our “home ground,” and began to spend more time in Louisiana. The acute grief I had lived in, and with, after her leaving, softened into a kind of sad-sweet “background” of my life. She had lived, had been a lively and spirited part of my own life, and now was gone. But in this “home place” where she and my father and their parents and grandparents and ancestors had played out their lives, the realities of past and present blurred. The past wasn’t something that had happened already; it was a living, thriving part of my everyday life.

The following is a little note from earlier this year…..

1/31/18 a.m.
Bodi and I take a good and long walk toward the river this morning. Sun melts up over the woods and shines on little ponds. The air is colder; and in the night, frost has settled on the grass. The ground is wet, but we walk on the batture anyway, to be closer to the woods. Bodi picks up a few burrs in his cottony paws. Red shouldered hawks sing from trees, and egrets hunt in puddles. At the beach, much driftwood has piled up, worn smooth by the pounding Mississippi. The usual mess of debris, swept up somewhere far away and deposited here, lies all around: battered hard hats, used water bottles, bits of rusted pipes, and other trash. Tracks of beaver and herons and ducks trail across the sand.

At the water’s edge, the steady, churning, relentless and busy river flows. I stand and take pictures of the contrasts – the river’s quiet force, the long sandy stretch of wet powdery soil, a fallen and current-beaten log, the distant industry of oil and chemical plants, the tug boats pushing barges upriver.

I want to sit on a log, and watch it all. I want to see with these aging eyes what you saw in your own life, in those quieter times – the little busyness of a ferry or two chugging across choppy water, and maybe a few carcasses swept up – a dead and bloated pig, an injured duck, a ravaged dog.

I have no idea what you saw then, but now, a new layer of this waterway and its life is settling over my skin, resting side by side with what my little girl eyes saw in small snatches and wondered about, and longed to know better.

If I had been a freer child, a more adventurous girl, I’d have slipped away from the clutch of homes, drawn by all the exciting tales about the river. I’d have sat on a sodden log, watched and waited, been swept up like all the driftwood bits, like one of the ducks or wild pigs, and made myself a nest. A little nest of happy watchfulness at the edge of this big stream.

But I didn’t.

Still, here I am all these years later, sinking into these layers of love, of a wild place, and of where you used to be, right here in front of me now.

Home.