A Hard Earned Goodbye: You Can Never Go Home

I arrived back home after the 20 hour drive around 2:30 in the morning, after just over a week away, a week spent in my old college town, frantically trying to make repairs to my formerly beautiful house in Muncie, Indiana, in vain. It had been vandalized, most of the wiring torn out of the basement by drug fiends, the interior horribly filthy and neglected, stained walls and ruined floors, water dripping from the ceiling, mildew on all the wooden surfaces… My very own halloween haunted house.

It is so hard to see the home I lived in the longest in my life, for the 5 years I earned my landscape architecture degree, lovingly repaired and remodeled over those years — just trashed. At first I was furious with the tenants who had treated the house like garbage, who had eventually been evicted. And then I felt disgust as I scrubbed the walls and floors, pulled nails and screws and staples from every window frame and wall, removing all traces of their occupancy as best I could. But then I began to feel something else…pity. These people were poor, and they were ignorant. Machine screws and incense sticks jammed into holes in the walls, plastic and cardboard stapled over windows in what I am guessing was a vain attempt to insulate. Repairs that made no logical sense. They were either very desperate or very stupid or both. My money is on both.

Delaware County Indiana boasts the highest incidence of meth lab busts in the nation. Not per capita, either, just the flat out highest, anywhere. I was informed by an old friend there that heroin has also become epidemic. My old neighborhood, always on the rougher side, has slid into an absolute horror show of poverty and drug addiction. It twisted my heart to see the collision of poverty and drug addiction all over the town, and in my own beloved house.

I’ve been wicked depressed this year, more depressed than I ever knew was possible. Depressed as in, “I don’t know where the bottom of this fall is, but I hope it is close because I’ve been plummeting for months” depressed. Depressed in the sense that everywhere I look the world seems bleak, and I have a great deal of trouble believing that there is a purpose to our lives, to existence itself. I don’t know where this comes from, but it is rooted deep and I am struggling to beat it somehow.

I drove across the country, twice in a week. What I saw was hard to see. America. America, you are overweight and have a cigarette dangling from your mouth. You are texting while you drive, and you are buying a bunch of time-saving crap in order to spend more time doing what? Watching television? Vegging out online? The uniformity of the retail stores is unremarkable in its ordinariness. We’ve traded intention for convenience , and mindfulness for distraction. America, you are strange with your TRUMP spelled out in christmas lights in front of your ramshackle trailer. You are selfish in your hogging of the passing lane. You are mean spirited and small and uninformed and corporations are taking over where mom and pop got edged out. And yet there is a decency at your core, I just know it.

I’m trying not to conflate my ruined house with my pointless and somehow disappointing life. It’s hard. It isn’t a metaphor and need not be. Last Halloween we were dealing with catastrophic, deadly flooding on my farm in Texas, so this one seems gentle as a lamb by comparison. Trying not to make a farcical presidential election into a cautionary tale about polishing deck chairs on the Titanic. It was hot my last day in Muncie. I was on my hands and knees scrubbing and I was sweating buckets, and wearing a tank top. It should be snowing there. The trees still held leaves, and that is an indication of foreboding fluctuations in the climate.

Every single inch of my body aches from this fool’s errand I crossed the country to complete. Polishing up the remnants of my near-valueless house that I will hold my nose and sell at a loss. Every stain scrubbed, every nail hole filled, every inch mopped and mopped again — I guess it was a long, pain-filled way of saying goodbye and good luck. A reminder that everything requires care and maintenance and can be redeemed even though it may seem challenging to a point of being insurmountable. All is not lost. There is hope, even though your hands may crack and bleed and swell with effort in gleaning it from these dark corners.

What I will say is that I woke up this morning to ducks quacking. If I wasn’t still trudging through the river of shit that is my emotional life, I might have even been happy about it. It is beautiful here in the new home I have made, even if it requires effort to appreciate. Where there is life there is hope, this much must be true, even if it doesn’t look the way we wanted it to.

“There is a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in”

~Leonard Cohen