MAKING IT HOME

MARCH 2020:

It rained three days and three nights before I began my move from Valparaiso, Indiana to Phoenix, Arizona. And before that, it snowed—I watched its drift turn to heft as it piled on the slopes of cars parked below my apartment. The first snow of Spring, I thought. How very “Northwest Indiana.”

It is mid-March and I am moving from my apartment just off campus to my parents’ house in Phoenix, and I can’t help but reflect on the other times I have moved recently: three different places in as many months last summer, and a few friends’ couches in between. The moving began in May, that time. It was warm, pleasant and sunny, the perfect beginning to a Midwestern summer. I broke a sweat as I carried boxes down four flights of stairs, loaded my car, drove them to storage or to the next place, and repeated the process again—alone. I built my moving days in increments marked by little tricks I picked up: prop the building door with the rug, leave the apartment unit door closed-looking but unlatched; carry less so I can move faster; only take the elevator when I’m carrying boxes—going up, just sprint.

This time, just like last summer, I mark the most absurd things as “necessities” and pack them in the car for the move. The rest is discarded, donated, or stored. I hold my bright red French press and my robin’s-egg blue Moka pot, weighing my options. Mom is here to help me move this time, and she sees me deliberating. “Why do you need to bring those? Don’t you have a coffeemaker at home?”

At home. Those words ignite me, but even as I am warmed the tears spring. This is home, I think, but I respond, “the coffee tastes different with each brew method!” I pause; she looks incredulous. “Fine, I’ll just bring the French press.” Mom expertly wraps it in paper, a reflex developed from too many moves, repeated displacement, in her childhood.

The moves prick my memory like thorns in a crown, but when I push my recollection a little harder, scrutinize my mind’s eye for things it’s seen and forgotten, I realize, of course, there was plenty between the moves. I feel most sharply the uncertainty of those loose days between apartments, days unaccounted for in my planning. I kept to myself, bringing in only the bare minimum to each friend’s house. I slept on couches, happily; I ate dry goods from a bag by my suitcase and carried my toiletries to and fro like I was in a freshman dorm. I kept my own pillow with me, and let the tears fall only after every other person was in bed—or better yet, in the shower. The brief stints of actual homelessness accentuated the gnawing feeling that I’ve had as long as I can remember: I don’t know where home is.

***

JULY 2019:

I don’t know that I know anyone in the fire, affected by it, or that I will watch the news tonight and recognize so many faces of firefighters from around town—I just see the smoke and know it is coming from the direction of my summer apartment. And I know that two very gentle orange cats, entrusted to my care for two months, and whom I have grown very attached to, are in that apartment. 

I am no stranger to the idea of the unexpected wildfire, flames leaping from foothill brush into human civilization. Now the smoke flattens itself against the summer sunset glowing low and close, the way only Midwestern pre-dusk skies do. Now closer, darker, consuming my vision. I stop mid-counter-wipe on my closing shift at the café. I can’t help it. I feel my blood flow slowing, a perceptible shut-down. The mass of smoke spreads, yet— it is so non-dimensional, so unmoving; the top edge expands so quickly, billows so profusely, I can’t comprehend a stop to it. I speak feebly at first, then frantically: “I live over there. My cats are there.” 

Our last lingering customer, I suddenly realize, is holding his phone up to record this moment in his life: the unbelievable gray smoke conquering the sky, blocking our collective view of the town so familiar. I don’t blame him. He is simply following his urge to document, to revel in spectacle, to bear witness—as humans always have. 

“It’ll be ok,” my coworker says to me. “I heard sirens already. Breathe.” 

“Be safe,” the customer says on his way out the door as I sling the mop out of the bucket and squeeze it three-quarters-dry. As if I have a choice, as if I can leave the mop and bucket in the middle of the unfinished floor next to the splash of dirty water I unwittingly spilled. As if leaving now would guarantee my safety or the two creatures’ who rely on me, even when I’m not there…

***

JUNE 2008:

Fourth grade, my first at a new school, is over and summer break this year is special: the beginning of a tradition that will last until I leave home for college. Mom is taking my sister, Sophia, and I on a long cross-country road trip.

After days of driving and a few interesting stops along the way, we finally cross the Illinois-Indiana border. “We’re in Indiana!” I announce, waking Sophia, ecstatic to finally be in range of our trip’s east-most point, where we planned to stop and explore for a week or more. Out the window, the auburn fields dotted with hay bales are unfamiliar but oddly soothing, nothing like the Valley of the Sun with its sage-speckled mountains and congested six-lane streets and vast interwoven neighborhoods and overflowing strip-malls. I cannot stop looking out the window at the summer green and blue.

“What is that?” I ask Mom, pointing to the elevated orb perched on a toothpick-like stem. 

“It’s a water tower,” Mom replies. “It has the town name on it, see? ‘Merrillville.’ It holds the town’s water and the pressure distributes it to everyone’s pipes.”

If that’s true, where does my city get its water? I ask. Mom answers: “Have you seen that kind of…big white cement tank on top of a mountain when we drive on the freeway sometimes?”

It has never occurred to me to wonder about that cement cylinder. But of course our Phoenix water has to come from somewhere, and so does Merrillville’s, and everywhere else’s. I am intrigued by this strangely distinctive type of water tower, an eyesore on the horizon, instantly recognizable from a distance. It’s comforting, in a way. This is a town up to modern standards. You can tell from a glance, by that water tower. Unless you’re in Phoenix, of course, where the mountains obstruct your view and you can’t see the water tower at all except from one road in one direction. 

***

MARCH 2020:

From those early road trip days, even now, I remember landmarks and moments, snippets of days spent together in new place after new place—but most of all I remember driving through Indiana for the first time and seeing things I had never seen before: water towers and grain silos. That summer I learned that my definition of anything can expand at any moment, in the most unlikely, passing experiences.

Now I am facing the reverse trip, Indiana to Arizona, and no foreseeable return—to Indiana or to familiarity. Everything seems to have gone wrong during this move so far: keys locked in the apartment, an hour drive to get the spare from my roommate; a dead battery the morning of departure; failed Bluetooth connections in the car and bizarre Apple Map directions. We leave Valparaiso as quickly as possible, already behind schedule, and I look up from trying to connect my phone’s Bluetooth only to realize I forgot to take one last look at the town and now it’s too late.

Mom routes us through St. Louis on I-55 and I have to wonder about her reasoning. Is this the fastest route? It doesn’t seem like the fastest route. I drift in and out of napping in the passenger seat, and her voice pulls me from half-slumber.

“Look, there’s the arch—watch!”

I perk up, alert. I fumble for my instant camera. We pass the arch, and St. Louis is a patch of sunshine today. The side nearest us glints blindingly. “Do you remember when we visited and went up the arch on our first road trip?” Mom slows as much as is feasible in the interstate’s right lane.

“Of course!” I reply. My eyes are glued to the silver arch, its legs crossing and then uncrossing from our sixty-miles-per-hour perspective. None of my photos come out—overexposed, blurry, badly composed—but the proof is in my memory. Mom routed us this way on purpose. We stop for gas and continue toward Tulsa, our stop for the night.

***

JULY 2019:

Driving home from work I mark street after street at each intersection. I know I won’t have to look hard to spot firetrucks and emergency vehicles, but still I squint down every road, because each one brings me closer to (temporary) home. Finally I see them and take inventory: two fire trucks, a police vehicle, no ambulances. A blackened collapsed roof but brick walls still standing. And as I drive further: one street, the train tracks, another street, one driveway, my apartment.

“Too close for comfort,” Mom says, when I call her days later to tell her. I can’t figure out to tell her that I had truly believed it was my home burning down when I saw the smoke through our panoramic windows at work, or how excruciating the drive home was, a mere five minutes stretched into infinity, my chest tightening with my grip on the steering wheel.

When I finally see the scene of the fire, I learn that it isn’t so close after all; the flame could not have blistered my walls from here; but it seemed, from just a few miles away, to be the very same point.

And from then on, every time I passed the street of The Fire I craned my neck to look. Mentally I would tesselate the caved black roof and its jutting rafters onto my own apartment building. I watched the progress as the building was re-covered, a leasing sign posted out front. I can never blow that day’s smoky sky from my mind, even when I’ve moved again and my commute route has changed. 

***

March 2020:

What if it had been different? What if we fill a tank with something, anything but water, and elevate it on a pole? What if I could stay in Indiana for the duration of my lease and beyond, as planned? What if the things I know kept holding true? I trust the structure of a water tower to mean one thing: potable water for distribution. I do not look at a water tower and think, what’s in there? I know, or I seem to. I know each morning as I lock my front door that I will have to come back and unlock it to reenter. I know so many things, which is to say, I trust the world not to lie. I expect a water tower to look like a bulb on a stick, not a tank on a mountain.

None of us makes a home expecting to dissemble it in a matter of days for an emergency move-out, to drive nearly 2,000 miles in two days, boxes of necessities rattling with the telltale middle-American potholes. None of us leaves home expecting to come back to char and animal carcasses, or to never come back at all. 

What if I never find a home at all? What if I can’t ascribe enough meaning to the terrain around me, and what if I can’t retrospectively construct a reasonable narrative? Or what if I ascribe too much meaning to dirt and old apartment walls? Leaving Tulsa, I am first driver, and Mom takes the passenger seat. I choose the route from here to home—or what will become home—and I expect we will make it there and I will make it work because I always have before.