Eastern Shore home

adapt, be lucky or escape?

Adapt, be lucky or escape?

Home continues to be forefront and foremost for me. The place I defend, deaf, blind and dumb to consequences? The physical place where illusions, progress, growth and expansion are born and reproduced? The place that makes me happy? The original place of protection from the inside and from the outside? What exactly?

The words below come from a deep well of displacement from home, a punch in the stomach, and I bring them here because I feel we are all complicit in the displacement of a myriad, a multitude of creatures on earth, without pausing to consider what we are doing, what we are saying, and what we are feeling, while doing what we do not quite know we are doing... oh, well. We do know it, sort of, but it gets dismissed...routinely replaced by something shinier, like a butterfly.

The words were written before the turn of the century, 1999/2000, and I never felt comfortable enough to share them. Now, I have somewhat clearer frames, where I can fit better like a nomad, when I can switch from self and sometimes reverse the mirrors and see from the outside. An existence of lesser certainties, yet an existence with a hell of a lot more movement and fun. 

Eastern Shore home

I place my fingers on the proper keys  
to peck and choose praise and complain.

This is my land,
	my place of choice,
here still is where I stay.

Turn off the highway at head of neck, then start the habit,
	we pass each other on the shoulder, to the right, slowly, 
let you turn left instead,
while we, like sneaky beaten biscuits, expeditiously move on,
- a practice that would kill elsewhere in traffic.

Turn off the highway towards 579 my head of neck I know
- home is for sure not far away from here.

Sometimes from Borneo, sometimes from Zomba and the mountains,
war zones near the skies of Mozambique, 
sometimes from the wars of family, down south in Brasil, 
sometimes from images, sometimes from deep green and
purple colors of jungles and feathers of feelings,
sometimes from National, B.W.I. or Dulles, 
sometimes from downtown D.C.

Turn off the highway to home, careful of rabbit and of deer.

Once, when the grandchildren were barely seven and still interested,
we counted three hundred and six rabbits 
between the stretch of head of neck to home.  

That happened before we had to move away from home and the head of neck, 
in disgust over issues of pollution and sickness, people saying that man had the right to poison my tomatoes and my life with swearing, his rumored rapes and his sustaining boat building poison called styrene.

“Oh, don’t you worry none, honey. Your little tomatoes are safe.”

I would have taken a more humane position for him and his folk, had he not made it impossible for me to breathe, 
to have to run away gasping, day or night, 
when he pleased to start work on his fishing boat. Not a week, but months, then a year, as the crab were not there, the oysters with disease, the wife already frying fast food at the local diner. 

I would have lived easier had I gone further in the grievance of the sometimes called wrongly the “due process” of the law of the land, 
when this land, I learned, is a land of local, 
with not much outside law… 

When people I knew then, told me I was being unreasonable and with an attitude.  Mansplained, with careful articulation, a notch higher registry and volume: 
“All that man wanted was to provide for his family and build an oyster fishing boat for his son, who was maybe a little slow, you should understand… What with no opportunities, the loss of house and land, and all this invasion from New England, from Jersey and Philadelphia. How could he possibly cope? A disappearing way of life, indeed!”

As if the folk around me were not coming from the other sides, full of retirement, invested inheritance money and sustainable plans to curtail the deer, shake the invasive swan eggs and make room for more kin folk.

“We do organic and shop at Fresh Fields on the way over. We dream of land, just bought this farm, we do not ever allow plastic wrap, you know, we dream of land. I have my eyes on this used Ford tractor, over in Caroline County, a beauty of a machine! All the attachments. You know, with the size of the property, two acres, and we are eventually winning over the sweet lady next door, I mean she is now alone, and it is possibly a wetland, which means we would just preserve. We need this kind of power. My partner does not quite agree to it, but she is gonna love it. We are going to grow herbs and natives. We are taking care of the fallow land, such a waste, an agricultural shame! 

This is going to be a native paradise, kind of, home away from, kind of.

Anyway, we love the peace and quiet, and this way of life. We have a responsibility to be stewards, on behalf of the Environment and of the Earth!”

What a sob story! I felt then…about the poison and the water man, the saran wrap savers, the conservation folk!
When I had to sell the house and home, the old gardens, the vegetables.
Move away from home, the white picked fence dream of peace and the little fishing village. 

What a sob story, almost five years later, I feel now. 
No disrespect intended for none of the parties, except for that crazy man and his styrene, there is not much respect in me for him, and even then, there is some. The styrene episode is part of change. So is he, the Eastern Shore Man and his Eastern Shore Woman and their Offspring.   

And here still is where I stay.

But then I ask, now,

Where is the home between the beaten grasses laying low by wind in the land? Inside the swamp, hibiscus white land of blue iris, lobelia red?

Where is the home where heron feeds?
Hard peck on pickerel weed and duck potato?

Soft in the name of copper yellow meadow,
	like Grands discovery of red hair tinted for the Chesapeake,
“may I live just one more season, please?”

Soft like gray of winter we no longer remember?

Hard as my neighbor, the postmistress, telling of the crossing to Tilghman, when the waters froze. “We walked over the Bay, from home to visit friends in Tilghman, we walked over the Bay!”

Soft, like when we got the keys on trust to the old rusty, only family car to go and get food half a mile up the road, straight on, you cannot miss!
Sailboat tired, thirsty and hungry, just landed from the West on to the unexpected, welcomed shores of soft Queenstown, in the East.

It is like being invited to Thanksgiving dinner with kale and vinegar, and the kids back from college, first ones ever to leave, sweet potatoes and gravy.
When you are alone in the village, your mate elsewhere in Pakistan or Uganda, earning means to inhabit, and buy a house here, and staying put and being the same.
And the people at dinner a place you will always remember as a beacon to home.

Where then is my home, in this yielding growth?
Where is the territory of beiges I once loved,
the place of weedy grasses, scaling sycamores, willow oaks?

Where is this place where I abandoned,
met salamander in a shallow pond?
Gave up on drum fish and chose instead
to spoon catch the blues?

Where is this place of home?

A dozen years later, in August of 2024, I stand in line at the tractor and farm supply store to buy bird food. The farmer guy ahead of me has a cart loaded high with huge bags. We meet a second later in the parking lot. He is methodically lifting the fifty pound hog feed and whatever else bags on to his truck, and I gingerly negotiate the narrow passage between his cart and my car, wincing as I step sideways, knees screeching and screaming at the unexpected turn, hands grabbing hold of the hood. 
He says “Oh, I’m sorry!” And I laugh “Oh, no that’s not on you! That’s on me!” 
A mini second delay and he says:
“Amazing what we have to put up with, when growing old, isn’t it?” 
"And we learn to laugh, don't we?", I say.
More chatter in smiling and a true and genuine “You now have a nice day, you hear?” “You too, for sure!” I did and I am pretty sure he did too.  

Sometimes I wonder, but most times I know I stay in the Eastern Shore because the people here still remind me of what home is.

In a recent documentary about the behaviors and minds of dogs I heard a most amazing statement about one of the main traits considered as essential in their successful journey from wolf to dog – their incredibly adaptive capacity towards friendliness - their ability to befriend humans.

I am still learning... trying to be friendly and kind.

I am also learning that most of my stories morph and shift in time. This one brings me to Aldo Leopold and the wolves, the mountains and the changing waves that rivers draw on lands, the deep cuts that wolves may bring. 

https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-leopold-tlam.pdf

"It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them."