Carla Homeister


Homebound



"You may speak without disguise of what moves and worries and excites you."

--Scott Russell Sanders

In the midst of an early morning when I cannot and do not have the desire to sleep, I am thinking of home, of Iowa, where I will soon be returning to, as if I had never left. Now, as I think of my birth-place, I wonder about the things that I have done to myself and what has been done to me. Mostly, I am thinking of what I missed while I was busy pitying my own lousy sense of self-esteem and self-worth in the isolation of a psychiatric unit. I think of the landscape that I did not paid attention to until the very moment I left it; I think of the dissipating cicadas as the sun rises up out of the edges of the horizon on hot summer mornings, wondering when I might hear them again. I think of the house that I grew up in and all that happened in it.

It is home that moves and worries and excites me, it is what keeps me awake now as these words spill out across the page. I will go home to the rural roads of a farmer's world, traffic thinning to a trickle as we drive away from the city, down the paved highways with fields of corn and beans on either side. It will be the air I breathe, filled with the smell of fertile soil and remembrances of past rains and droughts and floods.

That is what moves and excites me--the sight of that place flowing on my skin and into my memory for a week or two out of my year. But going home also means confronting my parents even if only by eating and sleeping in their house. It means that I must be anorexic-free every second of every day, or must pretend that I am, since the anger and frustration in that house mounts like a volcano that does its best never to erupt. It means that all things which happened at any time in the past either did not happen, or they no longer matter, and therefore are not up for discussion. When I walk in the door and stare up at the twelve foot high ceilings, antique crystal lights gawking down at me, I breathe in the stale air of a family who have not spoken a word of truth to each other in 35 years. Leading us on were our predecessors living in other houses and towns across the state. The grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts and great-aunts, run through my blood, my bones, though I never knew them, though they never entered this house. These are the people who willingly sewed their own mouths shut because the pain was too great. These are the people whose stories and dreams I will never know.

But truth seeps through time like the wind coming in from 50 million years ago: the world shifts in time and space; land moves, oceans and rivers and lakes rise and fall, peoples and animals die, but the wind remains the same. So do the events of the past. Even silence speaks at some point.

No one should be burdened with these things. But I would rather cope with the truth and cry: my great-grandfather beat his wife and seven children for three and a half decades. My great-grandmother was shot and killed by her husband the day before she signed their divorce papers. He killed himself. Their grown children died not speaking of it, ever. My mother, in short bursts of sudden rage and anger slapped me into the walls now and again when I was a child. My father was so severely abused by his alcoholic father that he quit school at the age of fourteen so he could move out and get a job. Now he lies to my mother, brothers and sisters and I about having quit smoking because he's too embarrassed to say that he can't quit. I have starved myself for more years than I care to say. At times I lie to my family about what I have eaten so the questions will stop. But these are not catastrophes, I want to say to my family. Judgment has not been passed. We are not damned, and even if we were in the eyes of some higher power, I don't care.

Going home is never as simple as it should be.