What Takes You Home? by Betsy Ashton

Home. We define it in so many different ways. The place we grew up. The place we live now. An imaginary locale we wished we inhabited. It doesn't matter what you call home. It matters that you have one.

And, now that you have admitted you have a home, what calls you to it? Is it the memory of an event that makes you smile? Like that Christmas your Uncle Greg told stories of his days hitchhiking across the United States in search of himself? You roared until your sides ached. Of course, that was the same Christmas when his daughter Cheryl ate all the butter cookies and threw up on a pile of unopened (and never opened) presents. I'm not sure Uncle Greg found himself, but he was a wicked story teller.

Is it a smell? Marcel Proust's memory of a cookie is world famous. Does the memory of a smell draw you home? Your mother's cooking, burnt chicken on the grill, your grandmother's talcum powder, your father's pipe tobacco?

Or, like me, is the home you return to in your memories a place, not a house, but a place. For me, it's a place we called the compound, three trailers with a connecting platform, where my cousin Jerry and I wiled away the hours in our preteen years, vast, open spaces outside the chain-link fence that surrounded that compound. Hundreds of square miles of sage brush, cactus, jack rabbits, chipmunks, a dog named Duke, and two burros, Shorty and Fatso. Today, we'd never name a burro Fatso, because it's politically incorrect, but she was round. We didn't know any better.

The place that draws me back, the memories that are as alive today as they were over fifty years ago, center around those trailers, animals, and my aunt, uncle, and cousin with whom I lived every summer. The only child of a single, working mother, I was grateful for three months of absolute freedom to roam. And roam we did. We walked all over the high desert of Southern California. We lay on our backs in the sand and watch Air Force jets maneuver and leave contrails, those magical pathways that took our imaginations to the stars and back. We rode the burros when we got tired.

My cousin and I read voraciously. My aunt and uncle only had a small television set, three channels, all black-and-white. Not much choice if you didn't like game and variety shows, boxing on Friday night, or wrestling on Saturday. We didn't care. We read the library empty of books, many way over our school grade. We grew strong and sturdy, tan with blond streaks in our hair. We were free-range kids before any such term needed to be applied. We just were.

Because those days keep beckoning me, even though my cousin, aunt, and uncle have all passed, I feel compelled to return, perhaps because I'm the last one who remembers. NaNoWriMo is almost on us. I think I'll make this out-of-the-desert story my project.

What draws you home? And are you doing NaNoWriMo with me?