Home

I have called a lot of places home. Sometimes home has been for a night. Where I lay my backpack and have a meal and share a fellowship and a hospitality. Sometimes home has been a mansion, literally. I walk in mansion halls more than I would like to admit but I am uncomfortable in them. I feel they are not where I belong. Foyers echo with a sound I am familiar with but do not like, the sound of no voices and only my footsteps. Best are the pad thump of my feet on earth. Who would ever have thought a man could love a floor of earth. I love the smell of it. I even love the dust even if it is something the ones imprisoned there do not wish to have. I suspect they would all love the mansion. They would make good use of the mansion I am sure. They would fill it with the noise of their marauding, the clank of cooking and pleasure of singing. They would hang stuff from every wall and would never use the machine washer and dryer. But this will never happen. They will live on dirt floors and I will long to go back to them. It isn’t better to be poor but I think it is better to be poor in money than in spirit. Home has nothing to do with money except the air condition and nice carpets money buys. Home is this grandmother consoling her grand baby. Consolation isn’t owned by oak panel walls. I love this photograph of Grams in her hovel in a disregarded village corner outside Gonaives, Haiti. I live there still in my memory.