honing in on home

i'm in maine still today but will be leaving for the cape tomorrow. my time home has been: a lot of sleeping in, staring at trees shaking in wind and rain, cutting an absurd amount of peonies from the garden, and chasing out the subtle melancholia that i always feel steeped in when encountering my "childhood" room. today i spent the morning rummaging through boxes that i had so carefully packed away and are now in the shed rotting with moisture and soiled with all the newspaper bits eaten at by mice. whenever i come back here i choose a few things to lug back with me; this time: my two favorite bowls, a tin angel and the best papers out of my collage collection (i have a stack of old tin tin comic books). my dream would be to drive a car back west some day with the rest of my bowl collection, my fabrics, language dictionaries, image encyclopedias and the vintage watercolor and pastel sets given to me by bianca from the slide library. in the past i have dreamed this but with the footnote that the destination was unknown. this time is different because the day i left san francisco i signed a lease to a place that for the first time since neveralways i see myself driving to and nesting in. unfortunately and probably for the best i am not able to carry my entire cookbook collection on the plane and will leave it once more for the mice and moistness of the shed. my stays here always have the feeling of being both too short and too long. the lack of routine, the sleepiness of quietness, the soft sad shroud that falls around me while i sit in my yellow submarine yellow room. when i walked in for the first time on monday, immediately there were photographs that needed to be shoved upside down into drawers (which my mother later said were left out for me so i could do just that), a shell that needed to change places, and boxes to be searched for (YES) my old slc hoodie and my bonnie prince billy cds. a lot of the searching also includes doing nothing but sitting with the boxes and noticing. the quality of packing shows quite clearly my state of mind during my prior visit. many boxes were left mostly empty with only the remnants of papers and clothes that i could not bear to throw away into the many trash bags i sat with during my last visit. i threw a lot away with the need to gather my favorites and let go of what doesn't fit anymore:literally and figuratively. this time the boxes will be even more empty and my luggage will be unpacked into a new but already home Home.