Charles François Daubigny: The Heritage of the Wagon
[The Children with the Wagon] (1861)

"…The Muse isn't certain what she wants to do with the furniture the new treasures will displace."

The pioneer tradition survives with the presence of a thriving wagon-lending industry led by a cleverly-named company: U-Haul. The name suggests that you do your own hauling, much as your post-Civil War ancestors loaded up their meager belongings and hauled their assets the better part of three thousand miles to Oregon. Then, one was expected to use their own wagon. Now, it's possible to rent one for the short duration of a modern migration. Who hasn't been shanghaied into helping someone move something or engaged in some shanghaing themselves? We maintain our treasures the same way we tend to acquire them, by carting them all over creation. I remember the time when my to-be first wife and I were able to easily cram everything we owned into the back of a Volkswagen Squareback Stationwagon. That was the last move either of us ever executed that didn't involve renting some wagon.

Those who rent wagons and vans tend to be the ones least capable of handling them.

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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.

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Shibata Zeshin: A bag (1866)

"…the world sure seemed to be her oyster."

I might be most skilled at creating complications for myself. This tendency never seems more present than when one of my grandchildren's birthdays approaches. Then, I feel compelled to live up to a little tradition of my own making, one that complicates what I might otherwise approach as a genuine celebration. (I reliably transform this opportunity into an obligation, and not just any odd old one, either, but a genuinely impossible-to-fulfill one.) Where I might have penned a small, short poem to the celebrant, tradition calls for a full-blown Bag Poem. A Bag Poem typically covers both sides of a paper shopping bag and runs three or four stanzas.

I never know where to start, though I have more than a decade of experience creating these.

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