The Digital Potlatch rolls on with more from BUFFALO LIGHTS! Yes, another free chapter from the book…
This one describes what it felt like to go back temporarily to our old house in Maryland after having burned our bridges and moved to New Mexico. I was only holding on to my sanity by a thread at this point, amid all but overwhelming doubt and conflict. You’ll read where I try to convince myself by slamming the old haunts, but that didn’t help — something else did, however, and keeps me going still. The main thing was, I knew that we had to keep moving forward and couldn’t come back, no matter how much that hurt. This is quite the thing to put oneself through voluntarily. I wonder what that means?
To access preceding chapters and the introduction, please visit the Buffalo Lights category page. (The official synopsis is here.)
Part II: New Mexico Project
Chapter 4: Light in My Eyes
Now this was weird — very, very weird.
We’d returned from New Mexico to Maryland to finish the packing postponed from earlier in the summer, but my mind and body just weren’t with the program. After weeks in totally new and often strange surroundings, finally getting adjusted and starting to settle in, to drive two thousand miles all the way back to a place I had shut out of my mind was more than a little unsettling. After we got there, I felt I was losing my mind.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” whispered the spirits, and it was true.
The Eastern Shore farmhouse was musty and stale inside, like any 70-year-old house in a damp climate. As I walked through the kitchen, an amalgam of mildew, ancient cooking odors, and rancid dust bunnies assaulted my nostrils. My lungs and nasal passages, purified and pink with new capillaries after a month at over 7,000 feet, reacted like salted slugs. I could immediately feel them twisting, squirming, contracting, and foaming with mucus. My sinuses ached.
I was reeling from the olfactory blows at the same time my mind was cracking from the tension. “I love the soft air! It feels so good on my skin,” exclaimed my wife, not unexpectedly. Her genes were only two generations removed from Leicestershire, after all. She immediately set about returning utensils to drawers and hanging clothes in closets, rhapsodizing all the while about what a fine house it was, and just look at all the space! — this from a woman who’d just quite happily spent five weeks in an 800-square foot adobe cottage with two main rooms. I stood there surveying the long musty kitchen, wondering what was growing behind the basement door, grinding my teeth and declaring inwardly: I’m not putting things away, I’m packing! — then obstinately deposited my suitcase, clothes, and travel bags in the middle of the dining room floor instead of taking them upstairs. When I retrieved the Sony monitor and the Power Mac 8600 from the truck, I set them down on the living room rug, even though the hardware would have to go upstairs for me to be able to work. No farther into the house would the boxes go, I stubbornly vowed. [Note: Such behavior is to be expected from those of us born under the sign of the Stupid Jackass. Conventional and Chinese astrology would mark me as a Leo born in the year of the Rooster, but that would be wrong. Trust me.]
The house was immaculate. We had cleared out a major portion of our junk before taking off for New Mexico at the end of August and left the place in suitable condition to be shown to potential buyers. “I’m not going to let you leave those things in there,” rang a musical voice that carried far more authority than one would think possible, emanating from a curvaceous five foot two inch hundred pound frame as it did. “I like the way the house looks, all nice and clean!”
[The jackass brayed and retreated to the basement to turn on the hot water heater. There he discovered a thousand wasps crawling around in a cold-induced stupor, crunching under his shoes. He grabbed a push broom to clear a space around the heater so he could kneel down and light the pilot. He could see the faint line of rust that marked where the water had risen after the hurricane, before the neighbor had gotten the sump pump running and saved their house. He lit the pilot, fired up the main burner, and while still peering into the lower innards of the heater, saw even more wasps illuminated by the glow of the gas flame. Hah, let the bastards get out of that fix, he thought. He closed the little tin panel, arose, crunched through the slowly reviving wasps between the heater and the basement steps, and calculated how long it would take for the water to heat. Hmm: there would be hot water tonight, before he collapsed from trip fatigue, and the jackass would have a bath.]
Over the next day or so, the weirdness continued to accumulate. I met our old heating oil deliveryman in the driveway. “I thought you’d moved,” he said, almost accusingly, as if resentful at having to adjust to my leaving twice in six weeks. And for sure, I would have left him in peace, except that our two and half-story farmhouse held the heat about as well as a tennis racket compared to the small southwestern adobe we’d just left. The encounter left me feeling more than a little odd, and I wondered what seeing our old friends again would be like.
I opened the Baltimore Sun. What a comfort to have a daily newspaper again, if only for a couple of weeks, I thought, except that everywhere I looked were stories about angry people. There was trouble in a Frederick County neighborhood because a woman had painted religious slogans on big rocks in her front yard. The local homeowners’ association, citing a prohibition against “noxious or offensive things,” was calling in the law. What would they make of the bathtub Madonna I’d seen in Costilla, I wondered? I remembered the illuminated Virgen de Gualalupe statue in San Cristobal and shook my head. Its primitive altar in front of the trailer across from the post office had always moved me with its simplicity and strength, but I judged it a no-go in Frederick. Outside the city, another group was upset because one of the neighbors had erected a large metal garage to house his motorcycle collection. Their spokesman said, “It’s been a dream to live on the water. To have someone come and destroy it with a commercial-type building in a setting that’s rural, it’s a shame.” What would they think of the dead school buses in the Vigils’ pasture, I wondered, or the half-dozen ’72 Mercury Comets rusting away in a nearby front yard?
Finally, I read about the hell being raised down in Talbot County. A 33-year-old woman had been brutally murdered trying to buy crack in nearby Cambridge. The good people of Talbot, ever mindful of the tourist trade, objected to seeing the lurid details printed in their local paper. This is the same area where a young man had recently blown away his 2- and 3-year-old kids with a .357 magnum for the insurance money, blaming the tragedy on a fake carjacking. Remembering this made me think that going without a paper was probably just fine.
Soon we saw the geese returning. So many of them were back on the Eastern Shore now that hunting was about to resume. I’d enjoyed the ban that had allowed them to flourish, and remembering past hunting seasons was depressing. For now at least, the birds were undisturbed, flying across the marshes in long, elegant V-formations, a glorious sight against the backdrop of changing leaves and empty cornfields.
A few days later we had dinner with a group of old friends and nobody hated me for moving away. We ate crayfish, shrimp, clams, oysters, and rockfish, drank lots of champagne, and a good time was had by all. Afterwards I checked the weather and learned that half a foot of snow had fallen in the mountains of the Southwest. We’d have to stick to the Interstates on our return trip, no doubt. In just two weeks we’d need to pack up everything we couldn’t deal with all summer. Would it even be possible? Probably so, I thought. There was a larger agenda than merely moving, after all.
Anyone who doubted had only to look into my eyes.
Related posts:
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 5, “Dreamwatch”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 1, “Imprinting”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part II, Chapter 1, “Betrayal”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 4, “Real Estate for Dummies”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part II, Chapter 3, “A Little Farther Out of Town”
