Arthur Rothstein:
Home of Postmaster Brown, Old Rag, Virginia (1935)

"Every past inhabits just such a shadow visible when any prior owner drives past."

For me, home has not always been where my heart lives. It has been a place where I could usually rely on finding a clean pair of underwear and a decent breakfast. I considered most of those Homes, twenty-three by my accounting, safe haven for a spell, if not always necessarily comfortable. They included temporary housing when my life was in transition, and permanent housing that ultimately ended up being temporary. Duration of residence seems to have made little difference in how deeply or whether I permanently imprinted on the least of those places, for I imprinted on each and every one in turn. I must have always been a homebody at heart, a heart each home would eventually wound if not necessarily break. I still consider every place I ever lived "my home," even if I haven't set snoot or foot across its threshold in more than fifty years.

I'm one to want to at least drive by the place, only to not immediately recognize it, what with all the changes it has undergone in my absence. One of the places I once called home in Portland advertises as an Airbnb now, though I'd never consider staying in the place. Too many semi-sacred memories could be disrupted by seeing its current state. I invested altogether too much of myself, failing to turn that place into a palace. I'd be afraid someone else, better financed, might have succeeded where I'd so obviously failed. Seeing it more fully refurbished might undermine my own memories of the place, which, like occupation, make up the bulk of my remaining relationship with it now. Each one of those Homes remains an implicate part of me and my legend. I can safely drive by and fondly recall, but I dare not enter there.

At some level, I attempt to re-enter every time I revisit a neighborhood where I used to live. These experiences seem a combination of familiarity and strangeness, of intimacy and alienation. It quickly becomes clear that I no longer live there, that I am no longer of that place I once found sublimely fundamental to my very identity. Time has always already taken that time away. What was once so familiar that I wasn't terribly aware of its presence, becomes a painfully present awareness that whatever I once so identified with, left little tangible behind when it left. We abandon our lives as many times as we move. Our lives, ever vigilant and constantly aware, move somewhere else along with us. Our former safe haven becomes the oddest strange attractor. Maybe I return just to feel my heartstrings getting tugged again.

That time has gone. I cannot mistake the present for any familiar past. The present always seems like an especially dystopian prior, however many improvements intervening years thought they wrought. The unfinished past, constantly yearning as it was, was not completed in its future, but degraded there. There are no such things as improvements, just disfigurements, acknowledging that every part was perfect in its time and place, but that its time and place were never part of anybody's possessions, regardless of the deeds and mortgages that ultimately failed to tie you to that place. Time slinked forward. The neighbor died one evening, and his family more or less abandoned the place next door before selling its side yard to a developer who built a curiously narrow house that completely encroached on the only view our old place ever had. Every past inhabits just such a shadow visible when any prior owner drives past.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz