once and future

everything is new to somebody, at least once. firsts are special things. first steps, first words. first kisses.

i don't remember my first steps.

i remember my first bout of homesickness. fourth grade. we took a trip to wyoming for a week and we lived in a cabin in the teton mountains and we learned how to snow ski and what shape the skull of a mule deer was. i missed my family and my comfortable place there.

to this day i remain rather prone to homesickness. a week in the mountains isn't any big deal, but sudden and dramatic shifts unsettle me. i ask, was i suppose to expect this? was i supposed to be ready for this? it's too... different.

home is never different. my family lives up north in a state i didn't grow up in, didn't go to school in, and hardly know a thing about. but it's home. it's there and it'll always be the same shape. that's what home means. even if you never can figure out, during your brief stays at christmas and weddings, where they keep the measuring cups, home is always the same. even if you aren't used to the constant rain and the damp mornings, home is ultimately comfortable.

five years of thanksgivings i haven't been home.

i don't remember my first thanksgiving.

i remember my first nightmare. it was snowing and a fat green dragon died in our front yard. scared me to death.

i don't have many nightmares these days. somewhere in my childhood i started praying not to have them. i would dilligently tack it onto the end of my bedtime conversations with god. please help me to have good dreams.

i think it worked.

when you're a kid everything is new. some of it you remember. some of it you don't. i am not a kid anymore. what do i get that's new? new car. new apartment. new job. same dreams.

so it's set in stone, my having grown up? my having made decisions?

seventeen days.

at the bottom of the deck my dad built at our old old house in utah, there is a set of handprints. that was home. i climbed those trees. i painted that sky with fairytales.

not anymore. nothing is set in stone.