Home

I'm home for the weekend, in theory. I think I still live here, 40 minutes from Chatham.

Someday I won't live here at all. It will either be only my beloved childhood home, where I sleep in my old bedroom on visits to my parents, or someone else will live here and I won't be able to come back at my own leisure. My house on the hill will most likely become someone else' home someday. But it will always be mine. Nineteen years of my life and what made me were spent here.

My parents have put the house on the market a few times. They price it high, so only someone who needs it will buy it, but whoever that may be, they have not come around yet. The 12 acres it sits on might appeal to a person with big pockets, who wants maybe their own hilltop, and a view of a corn field.

No matter who lives here in ten or twenty years, I wish the house its self would remain. But maybe it won't, and it certainly won't forever. Homes are torn down and changed it ways you could never imagine -- even in your lifetime.

My parents I visited Smelter Hill in Great Falls, Montana this summer. Where my mother spent her first 12 years-- the only ones with her father. For a while the EPA wouldn't even let you stand on the hill. Years of copper smelting put poison in the soil.

And all the houses are gone, my mother's as well. But she can still find her front steps. She thought she would live there forever, but she went on to live in New York, Chigaco, San Francisco, LA, and that hill in Pennsylvania. Some may not have been her home, some were just where she lived. Now my home is her home. Someday she will probably find another.

I will live in Alaska, Montana, Budapest, Zagreb. Maybe I will make homes there, and lives. But there is a first home, a childhood home, that never leaves your head or, dare I say it, your heart. No matter what happens to the land and the house, it shaped you in ways you will never fully be able to figure out.

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Smelter Hill

The dead hill is covered in yellow grass
Three archaeologists approach,
surprised that the entry is no longer barred
One lived when people lived, and was sent away
The archaeologists are here to see the remains
The lost city of anywhere’s walls cut the hill forever
Rusted metal fences like 60 year old spider webs
Protect the children long gone from the steep
The archaeologist sits down on her home steps
Down from the road that isn’t a road again
They lead to her great big house, seven siblings
That isn’t a house again. Yellow grass
The hill is covered in scrub trees
The walls of the lost city remain
The archaeologist climbs the hillside
Hand over foot up the dead waterwall
Such luxury this city had, her feet would once be wet
The dust kicked up in 100 degrees
It might still be in the soil, gray
There must be something in the soil
The reason for the tower and the men
The workers put the poison, in the soil
It’s ever so quiet, as the ruins fade
-This is where the wild cats lived
And this is where the children played
The pool was here, maybe here again
We weren’t supposed to go this way
But I did, the fort was here, and here again
Jimmy Cross lived here, keep off the father’s grass
The Christmas lights were red and green-
The rivers stays the same way past
As the ruins fade into the yellow grass
Scrub trees; they took away the shade
The archaeologist digs through the house that isn’t again
One curve of pipe the rain meant to fall through
Only a museum piece for the benefit of life continued
The archaeologist sits on her front steps
Take them down to hurry inside
To the house that isn’t a house again
And grows more alike the hill everyday
As the yellow grass grows taller and weaker
Higher and more like chaff
Scrub trees, the sun hammers down blows