This Place — Where We Live Now: short-shorts on a theme

Tim's Ford Lake, Winchester, Tennessee
by Barbara Tate

At sundown white herons glide along the shoreline and join in the quiet that settles for the evening over Tim's Ford Lake in Tennessee.

In my apartment I'm surrounded by the things that make me happy. One room is filled with books which are first editions, collected over the years. Portraits of ancestors hang over a fireplace mantel and an ancient L. C. Smith typewriter occupies a corner of the room, collecting dust. In the living room there is a large antique cherry coffee table with a massive marble top that rests in front of the couch where I work on my writing and Bible study. Directly across the room there's a large floor-to-ceiling bookcase that holds publications, anthologies, and magazines that contain my work, created over the past 50 years. I like to look at these things and know that I have tried my best.

My muse often sits by side, my little fuzzy buddy named CH Primrose Hillwood Gala. Retired from the show ring, this little poodle watches contentedly as big birds skim the edge of the lake.


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Front Porch, NE Georgia, USA
by C. Robin Janning

Season after season, the front porch is the watching heart of our home.

Spirit-lifting freedom can be found on the front porch along with solitude, welcome, and security — as contradictory and complimentary as flowers in spring and summer, followed by dormant brown grass in fall and winter.

On the front porch, glance left for clematis and a mountain view; glance right for the garden chair and pots (too many, maybe) of flowers and small shrubs. Look straight ahead to watch the sunrise, and later look up to glimpse the moon and Venus — surely they must be waiting for our notice! In winter, shut your eyes and breathe in a scent that is reminiscent of sandalwood (although surely it isn’t) floating uphill from a neighbor’s fireplace.

I wish the front porch ran along the entire length of the house. As it is, it is rather small — too small for even a small chair. But then again, it is the perfect perch at the end of a curving sidewalk, to watch and wonder and wave to a passing neighbor.


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25 Picton Road, Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire UK
by Christina Martin

At the back of the house the nasturtiums are trying hard to invade the pathway. There are quite a few of these lighting up the patio and competing with the squash plants for flowers. My bench by the old brick wall has a nice thick rag rug on it with old Indian cushions depicting the gods — this is where I sit and listen to the blackbird and watch the many sparrows pecking up my offerings . . . the seagulls bully everyone. Every half hour I hear the rumble of the bus sounds in the background.

So I will just put my feet up, thank you, and enjoy the sunshine as we don't usually get that many days of it here by the coast where we are beaten by the westerly winds from the Atlantic and Irish Sea. Everything has to be tied down and I just hope that the elephant-ear leaves on the squashes don't rip!

The light sky is inviting and I will make a nice cup of tea and take it out in a minute. I see that my climbing roses have multiplied; soon the back wall will be smothered in a white cloud.

The sea is amazonite today.


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Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA 
by Jo Balistreri

As I look out my study window, the rain continues. The trees and shrubbery in the court struggle against the wind. The homes are neat, one level, and they’re all painted in the same neutral shade with burgundy shutters and doors. We live at the top of the cul-de-sac. Most of us have planted our own flowers, and in the sun everything looks well-kept and cheerful. We live in Turnberry Preserve, a condo community. This is home now.

We moved here two years ago from a big home. Time to downsize. You’re getting older, your husband is not well. For us, it was the wrong advice. We went from an inside/outside house where nature was always with us, to the deadness of contained living. There is a modicum of energy. Once inside, the condo is a fortress. Most of the windows are placed too high. To sit by a window with a full view, there is only the deck sliding door. The kitchen, in the middle of the space that contains living room, dining room, two bedrooms, full bath, entrance and laundry exit, boasts a granite countertop on three sides. That’s right — only one way to enter/exit. We get our steps in and eventually, step by step, we adjust. We change things, make it ours as much as possible. This is our home.


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The Book Room, Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia
by Joanna M. Weston

Squirrels chase through the trees outside my window, in contrast to my elderly black cat asleep on her mat to my left, beside the computer. Her back rests against dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopaedias, ring-binders.
She snores. This is the norm at eight o’clock in the morning, with the printer clunking away on my right. I have two large windows with maples, walnut, alder, Douglas fir, and cedar ranged outside. An occasional chickadee, junco, or pileated woodpecker, will peer in at me briefly. Deer have sometimes stopped and
caught my eye, then, incurious, return to grazing. There’s a daybed in one corner of the room, useful for visitors. And shelves of books, anthologies of poetry, art books, craft books, grammar and reference books, a row of detective stories, travel books, and computer self-help books. It’s called “The Book Room” because I write books here.


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Sheffield Road, Enfield, New York
by Julie Lind

One of the three cherry trees in our yard might fall. You can’t see its base from the house. It emerges subtly, branches weaving into the white and blue pines that surround it.

Last night, after our two children were asleep, my husband, in-laws, and I watched it from the circle of chairs we had set up for dinner.

“What is that big tree?” asked Seth, my brother-in-law.

“It’s a cherry,” my husband replied. “It may come down soon, it’s old.”

I looked closer, studied the branches, saw how they melted towards the neighbor's yard. I could imagine the cherries, purple-red, exhaling their sweet breath into the sky.
           
The cherry has been on this land we call ours much longer than our house, which was originally built in the 1950s. My husband tore down the second floor when I was pregnant with our daughter, two years ago. We needed more space, he said. We were going up higher. The second floor is now framed, the top cathedraling into the silver maple to the east, the sugar maple to the south.
             
Someday, when our children sleep in their bedrooms, they will smell maple water from their windows.

All of the trees, maples and cherries, larches and pines, are audible from our current bedroom window, beneath which all four of us now sleep. Every morning, when I wake up, I hear the branches outside, rustling into birdsong, and I open my eyes into the home that they share with us.


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Renovation, third floor Catalina condo, Pasadena, California 
by Kath Abela Wilson

When I moved into his condo in 2000 he’d lived here since 1980. We found ourselves, after being friends for years, a real couple, after my former husband's illness and death. Rick had helped me through it. Now we had to decide where to live. Rick was a Caltech math professor. The condo is practically on campus. High ceilings, top floor, arched windows. Walking distance to everything. We decided to stay. He knew what needed changing. More light, skylights, bookshelves, color. It wasn’t a dream house, but a "bubble" as my daughter called it, away from the ordinary world. We moved out for a year. It wasn't done. I washed dishes in the bathtub for weeks. I mixed cement with my tears and stone collection, building a fireplace. It will never be done but it’s everything we ever wanted. Multipurpose wonder. Museum, meeting place, guest home for international friends. I remember I asking my friend Rick, years before life changed, the important question: “Is the Huntington (one of the great gardens of the world) walking distance from here?” He said, “Well, for you it is.” Now he walks too. We travel the world together, laughing. We live happily ever after.


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237 Stonehaven Circle, near Newfield, New York
by Kathy Kramer

Our house sits on a hillside, its back protected from north winds by a thick stand of trees. Its face, glass from floor to ceiling, looks south over an open valley with a line of maples marching diagonally, left to right, down the hill.

In our living area on the 2nd floor, I claim my space where I can sit in a worn recliner and gaze out, as from the prow of a ship. This morning’s breakfast there was my daughter-in-law’s homemade chocolate granola in the small yellow bowl given to me by a high school friend 50 years ago.

On the deck outside, painted driftwood gray, various potted plants substitute for the vast gardens of years past — one tomato plant, one cuke, some basil, chives, and several pots of the ubiquitous wave petunias, dark blue and fragrant as spice cake.

At night, when the house is quiet, I turn out all the lights and sit again in the old recliner. The glass face of the house is filled entirely with sky — sometimes moody with clouds, sometimes studded with stars.

If I open the sliding doors to the deck, it seems I can hear the gentle breathing of the plants, growing, as my children did, in their sleep.


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Called to Jefferson County, New York State
by Laurie Petersen

In the house where my mother asked me to move back with husband and kids since it was too big for my parents alone — the same house my parents later moved from because they didn’t want to live with us anymore — in that house I took care of my parents when they returned because they could no longer stay by themselves.

This big, solid-built former high school has stood here on bedrock for one hundred sixty years in a small town that is much less important now that in an hour, cars can take you a former day’s horseback journey away. I never really chose this place, but maybe this place chose me so I would look deeply at it, give it a voice, write it. As every square foot of the earth has a voice, but sometimes no one will listen.

I have lived almost half my life in a house that is barely mine, and by now I love it the way you love a great-aunt for whom you can do nothing right, who cries and stays up nights when something bad happens to you.

I think this house and I are like that for each other.


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Rio Guaycuyacu, NW Pichincha Province, Ecuador 
by Mimi Foyle

Awaking inside our mosquito net, I listen to the living sounds layered one upon another all around me. Sharp insect whine, sporadic peeping of frogs, the soft chortling of owls’ conversation from nearby trees;
the varied voices of water. Water defines these lowlands forests of northwestern Ecuador where I live, a symphony of flora and fauna, diversity of color, shape and texture. In contrast to my childhood home in Los Angeles, the interface between self and nature here is my skin, and perceptions come principally through the senses. I love our wooden house with no doors, few walls, and glassless windows. We track
approaching storms by the sound of rain pattering on the leaves, thundering on the tin roof, and then slowing to evaporate into mists — the hallelujah chorus of life coming out into the sun afterwards. We can watch hummingbirds in the hibiscus hedge from the dining room table, or as they try to feed on the gold fringe of our red lampshade. The scents of soil, flowers, leaves, fungi, blood, fruit, death and rain carry much of what we need to know, and our family-by-affinity supplies the rest. If home is where the heart is,
I’m home.


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Skedholm, Åland, Finland
by Saskya van Nouhuys

Before we lived here, before anyone did, when there wasn’t a house, there was flat granite that sloped down toward the sea. At the edge it became a cliff. At the bottom was a cluster of stones, perfect for a viper to sun itself after a swim.

It is still perfect down there for the viper to sun, and it does. Above the stones is a small deck. When we moved in I wondered if kids had built it. It had an unplanned look, like a nautical tree house. In spite of that we still have it. We built stairs down to the water from it, and a floating dock, connected to the stairs by a gangplank. At first we removed the stairs each autumn because the locals told us they would be crushed by the sea ice. But we got lazy and left them and they are fine. We still pull up the gangplank and let the dock drift, attached by a heavy anchor to the seafloor. The water freezes around the dock. In the spring we retrieve it, covered in bird shit that I wash off with buckets of sea water while the terns circle, scolding me.


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Main Street, Dryden, New York
by Susanna Drbal

There is a red door. I always wanted a red door.

The living room is large and long; it once was a garage, I suspect. The tiled floor is uneven, and rarely clean, however hard I try.

In my first-floor home, I was able to move my grandfather’s piano in, finally. It still needs to be tuned.

Cat evidence is everywhere: frayed upholstery, squeaky toys. There are clumps of hair in all the corners, at all times.

Out the back door, over the deck, sprawls an enormous pine tree, shedding needles and dripping tar. The glass-topped wrought iron table suffers.

My plants, after months of neglect and gloom indoors, now endure months of sun and more neglect. They continue to live.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hums and the cats mew, begging to be fed. There are magnets on the refrigerator shaped like the state of Ohio, a plate of sushi, an owl. There are photos of children, now years older.

There are books in the tiny hallway, across from the painting of the sad clown. There are books in the bedroom. There are books beside my bed. There’s my teddy.


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Waking Again, Slaterville Road
by Tom Clausen

Yet again, the gift, waking up from one dream to another! As I emerge from sleep I recognize the landscape of the bedroom. Yes, it all looks happily familiar and reassures me that the reality of this constant in my life is resuming right where and how I expected it should. Squirrel, my dear cat, is in his place at the foot of the bed keeping an eye on me, ready in case it is time for a treat. I keep a container with catnip crunchy treats on the headboard of our bed. He is always ready. I look around and am pleased with how I have “decorated” my side of the bedroom even though some might think it overly cluttered. On the wall above the bed is a lovely Maine coastal watercolor painting by my haiku friend, Ruth Yarrow. In the headboard just beyond my pillows is a line-up of my favorite poetry books by my favorite poet, Mary Oliver. Three calendars allow me to confirm it is a new day and remind myself what day, date, and month it is. After Squirrel has had a few of his treats, I get out of bed and enter this dream-come-true; another day, always now!


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My Home in Ithaca, New York
by Yvonne Fisher

My green house with white shutters is in the Fall Creek neighborhood. There is a red door and right next to it is a Mezuzah that I hung up for protection. My house is right near Gimme Coffee where everybody goes to sit and drink lattes. My front porch has a ficus tree, and pink peonies in a green vase, and a table and chairs. I sit and watch people pass by. Some are walking their dogs. Some say hi.

Inside my house is a feeling of calm and sweet charm. The house was built in 1860 and is just big enough. The living room is where I draw pictures, write stories, use my computer at the old desk from A's father. The dining room has a big yellow couch from A's mother. I have beautiful rugs from Afghanistan. One of them has the image of two camels woven into it. I have a sculpture of a baby Buddha sleeping on an elephant. On the mantel is a photo of a sea turtle from Hawaii. There is a framed photo of my mother and my Auntie Grete that my brother, Michael, took. My dining table was lent to me by two friends. It has extra leaves to make it bigger for when I have many people over, which is only on Passover or Hanukah, or when friends are visiting from out of town, or for informal memorial services for friends who have died: Larry or Sunny or Tony or Sal.

Upstairs are two bedrooms and a bathroom with two steps going down into it.

My house has everything I need. It makes me feel safe and happy and grateful. This is my home and I love it.