Like the hot girl summer, it melts as you approach it, normalcy as elusive as a white Christmas in Houston. You hold tight to a few things if only to distinguish this Christmas from the last, abnormal, one: a little shopping in stores for food and presents, spraying seeds, pods, and berries with gold paint, an air of festivity as thick as the fog that passes for holiday weather. All this is reasonable: you and your family are vaccinated. When you close your eyes, you picture the antibodies in your bloodstream, cartoonishly round like something out of Osmosis Jones. Your blood, a yuletide red, is in your imagination thick with fierce but adorable creatures seeking out and hunting down fierce but far from adorable viruses. You open your eyes to avoid lingering on the imaginary battlefield you have created, because if you don’t, you will at some point have to visualize the Omicron variant, and you, perhaps like your innocent antibodies, really can’t do it.

When I took three weeks to observe my dogs, I found myself anxiously returning to the problem of dominance. Which among my dogs is alpha? Is it Sydney, the (female) dog who has been in the household longest, and who seems most interested in complex interactions with humans? Is it the upstart Zuko, still, in accordance with the most recent dog wisdom, unfixed, the biggest and most athletic of the four dogs, but also the youngest and newest? Is it Djinn, whose parti-colored good looks and outgoing personality inevitably attract the most attention from strangers? I was fairly sure it was not Kendrick, who rolls over and shows his belly in a prototypically submissive way, and who trails the other dogs on group walks, sometimes falling back as far as the cat who occasionally joins us (but is surely not an official member of the pack?).

I interrupt the story of my dogs, to mark the second pandemic Thanksgiving.  Although I have in front of me the post from the first, even as I scroll through my photographs I do not remember much about it. This Thanksgiving, the more-so-but-not quite “normal” one slips more easily into the stream of memory, placing itself not so much in relation to the pandemic but to other Thanksgivings. The stream meanders back in time to an Italian childhood of turkeys specially ordered through the United Nations commissary, and in place backwards from my settled presence in Houston to sojourns in New Orleans, New York, Boston

Somehow it makes sense to begin by introducing the dogs, by their (of course human-chosen) names. Introductions often take place at the threshold of one’s home: this one is Sydney, this is Kendrick, this Djinn, this Zuko. I think of the first Bridget Jones movie, in which the socially awkward heroine practices a form of cocktail party introduction that depends on short descriptive phrases, on appositives. To translate into canine terms:  “This is Sydney, a miniature goldendoodle whose interests are rubber bones, chasing squirrels, and establishing household dominance ”

As I indicated in the last entry, I have long been compelled by the circles inscribed in the garden of Charles Darwin’s restored Down House. In that entry, I explored one source of that fascination: the embeddedness of work and wide knowledge in the landscape of home. But there is also something about the process of observation itself that seems important to me. Looking intently at a small piece of land in one’s own garden, or at a small corner of a room, defamiliarizes the familiar, corrects generalities. The process can make us more humble. And smarter.

As Robyn and I stepped into our friend’s car, we left Knole—and the ghost of George Scharf—behind. I am always relieved to say goodbye to Scharf, although, as my weary colleagues can attest, and as my last entry makes clear—he has a way of returning even after the publication of the book about him. As my friend Walt drove skillfully and on the scary side of the road through the lanes of Kent, there was one last glimpse of a certain portly middle-aged gentleman: we saw the roof of a heavily gated Chevening, another of the great houses Scharf had visited regularly. “Chevening ,” said Walt, “that’s a government place. Spying.” As I settled back in my seat I made a vow that I would not write to the British government and ask to penetrate this maximum-security establishment.

I have yet in this blog to discuss a very specific version of homing that was a regular part of my life before the pandemic: the visit, as a tourist, to a home-turned-museum. In England, where I have probably done most of this form of home visiting, this often involves an outing to a stately home, a relic of aristocratic or upper-class life preserved by the National Trust or similar organization as part of England’s “heritage.”

This fall was long anticipated to be an “in-person” semester. Although not as sexy as the “hot girl summer” that never quite was—and for which I was, in any case, too old—the promise of being in-person went—let us invoke all the dimensions here— deep. What does it mean to be, to feel, to be perceived as being “in person?” This question is complicated for me by what I take as extraordinary good luck. I am not teaching a class this semester. Between my administrative course release and the fact that I am substituting for a colleague in the spring, I have no fall classes.

As I look back I see (and hear) that I have tried on different voices in relation to homing: there are first-person accounts, third-person accounts, and even entries in the second person. I appear a s a girl, a woman, an “I” and a “you.” Some entries focus on my childhood relation to home and surprise me with the strength of their psychic pull. Some reflect my current persona and voice as a professor; although I hope that none of the entries are “academic” in the sense of being obscure or impenetrable, many of them are abut academic topics (the home/owner metonymy) and spaces (my classroom). 

It is always somebody’s water, because of what water is, what water does. Water moves along the chain of towns that line the Mississippi; if one town erects a barrier, the water moves across the river or downstream to flood another. Water seeks out weakness, low ground, open ground, poverty. In Texas, richer towns and neighborhoods widen their bayous. These places become safer and perhaps more beautiful. Downstream, the water surges into narrower channels, becoming faster and dirtier. We all want our water elsewhere, although some places are more elsewhere than others.

At this moment, and as I have done almost every Thursday since last summer, I am writing across from my friend and colleague, Brian Riedel. “Across” changes its meanings with the seasons, the level of COVID infections in the Houston area, and with our own domestic and professional commitments. We have met to write in parallel on my back porch, at times moving as the sun moves to avoid the glare on our computer screens. Post vaccination, we have met inside my house in my noisy kitchen or my dining room that seems quieter if only because it is bereft of its usual signs of use. We have also met remotely, Zooming from our homes or from our offices, sometimes even from neighboring offices. 

“Draw a house,” I tell my students. This prompt to college undergraduates and aspiring Ph.Ds can feel—must feel—infantilizing. If a given student is not an artist or an architect, they will likely, however, draw something very like what they must have produced as children. My students come from all over the world and live in many different kinds of homes: a skinny canal house in the Netherlands; an extended family compound in India; a New York apartment building; a suburban Texas ranch house. Some of my students live in homes that are falling apart around them; a few have been homeless for long periods of time. This how most of them respond to the prompt:

She gets—literally—off the boat, the ship as big as a hotel or a village, that has taken her from Rome to New York City. The boat trip on the Leonardo da Vinci was intended by her father as compensation to his wife and daughter for leaving the city and the life they loved. On the ship, suspended over blue water, they seem to move up in class and backward in time. There is a picture, taken by the ship’s photographer, of the family working its may through a reception line at a formal dinner. Her mother wears an embroidered silk skirt; her father, bronzed and debonair, a shirt and tie; she her specially made blue “dotted swiss” dress with a matching slip.

During a recent stint of minor illness, during which I stayed home and was attended to by my dogs for a few days, I returned to a playful Facebook post from several years ago in which I speculated about how Nightingale would have assessed dogs as nurses. It turns out that although they break some of Nightingale’s rules for patient care (and who doesn’t?) they would make surprisingly good home nurses according to the criteria she lays out. Here are some pros and cons of dog nursing. Quotations from Nightingale are in italics.

Dr. Ricci, my pediatrician, was probably an oldish man—of course I thought he was ancient. He was bald and smooth and a little rotund and I believe he spoke to us in English, although I am not sure. I don’t know how often he came to visit, since I don’t remember being sick particularly often, but he came enough that he was part of the rhythm of my childhood. He would bustle through the front door with a little black case, rounded, like him, at the top. It was the shape of my mother’s miniature purses but in his case large enough to hold a stethoscope curled like a snake always at the ready to listen to the sounds of my body. I associated the bag that held so many things with the carpet bag in Mary Poppins or Santa’s bag of gifts—a. peculiar disciplinary magic. 

It is not, then, my shoes that are causing my pain, which persists even when I slip them off hoping no one will notice that I am barefoot and shorter. In any case, what I am feeling is different from what I experience when I decide, as I sometimes do, to try wearing the few cute shoes that I cannot bear to throw away. This pain is also a twitch, as if my feet are itching to escape out the front door, into my waiting car, and home. I capitulate. I say goodbye to my hostess, look in vain but not overly long for my host, and leave. I

The solitaire is, by definition, hers alone. The girl and her mother do, however, share other homing rituals. Each night, her mother calls her father at the time tv sitcoms say is the end of father’s workday: 5 o’clock, or, if her mother can hold out (patience again), 5:15. There are no cell phones, so this is the last chance of contact if she does not want to call the bar at the Delegates’ Lounge in the United Nations building where her husband is probably having one drink or many with his colleagues. This is not an attractive option and reserved only for emergencies: a call to the bartender is humiliating and not always productive.

We met at a wedding in 1980 or 1981. Of course, you weren’t an actual guest: let’s say you were the presiding spirit on that occasion. I was in graduate school, just two years out of college, and this was my first friends’ wedding. Forty years later, I am still not a great wedding guest, but I do have your book on weddings and sometimes teach it in my “Marriage Inc” class, along with Chris Ingram’s critique of the wedding industrial complex, White Weddings. But I digress. Let’s put our feelings about weddings (and marriage) aside and talk about vegetables.

We are vaccinated, protected, enshrouded. We can eat at roadside restaurants without drive-in windows or even patios, search for the place with very best crawfish boil, or the one that serves crawfish boudin.  At night, when we are too tired to drive further, we can choose among motels, walk into the lobby without our own supply of the special aerosol Clorox spray we scored in an early-pandemic melee. We can sleep peacefully on hotel beds without wrapping ourselves in our own sheets. We can even enter, with (partial) impunity, bathrooms at gas stations and rest stops, registering and moving on from the merely disgusting as we did before toilets and doorknobs were fatal. Eating, sleeping, peeing, the road responds to our bodily needs and supports our bodily memories: this is how we used to do it, we think, as we close our eyes in those familiarly unfamiliar rooms along 1-10.