Homestead

It is 1980 and I am in my 1973 Dodge Dart Swinger, which/whom I have named Henry, with the enthusiasm of a first-time car owner. All my subsequent cars will be unnamed. My boyfriend, now my husband of 35 years, is driving, in part because I usually prefer not to, and in part because, as he says, he knows the road like the back of his hand. This would be the Valley Road at the Fishing Creek, PA exit of I 83. Scott is going home and bringing me with him. On the map, his family lives in the tiny town of Goldsboro, although the mailing address is an otherwise non-existent “Etters.” In 1980 it is easiest for Scott to say  he comes from somewhere near Harrisburg.

The Derricks’ family home, by no means hypothetical, is a farm. They had only lived there at this point for 20 years, but Scott thinks of it as his childhood home. For me, at 22, 20 years may as well be a lifetime. It may as well be 100 years. I look anxiously down the road for the first signs of the farm, wrapping my legs protectively in my long hippy skirt that says “farm” only in the sense of “Victorian farm.” This is Scott’s home. This is a homestead.  

Scott expertly maneuvers the curves of the valley road. Henry, whose shocks are not in good shape, responds to his driver, almost as if he were a horse. I don’t know about that “back of the hand” thing, but Scott—and Henry—seem to anticipate every one of the road’s turns and twists. Although he slows down infinitesimally for hills, he is going fast. I grab for the overhead handle on the passenger side, in a gesture I will repeat, to their annoyance, with both of our future sons as they learn to drive. The handle gives way as I touch it and I submit to Scott’s knowledge of the Valley Road.

He has taken me this way, he says, so I can see the Towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, across the river and a little bit downstream from the farm. The meltdown was 6 years ago when Scott was in a master’s program in Chicago. His younger brother went out the morning of the disaster to the Valley Road to catch a school bus; his dog, who always accompanied him to the bus stop, refused that morning to leave the house. Although I have been to many anti-nuke rallies and have even worn a button proclaiming, “We All Live in Harrisburg”, I have forgotten about the reactor in my anxious scanning for the farm and my search for acceptance from this close-knit family and their homestead.

I have already met three members of the family: Scott’s father, mother, and youngest brother, Dave, the one who was still living at the farm during the accident. We met at a basketball game in Philadelphia, the city where both Scott and I were getting our PhDs in English. Everyone in this story is a sports fan, so there was not much talking. I did not know if the family would say more on their own ground. I don’t remember much about the game, although I am fairly sure Villanova, then a basketball powerhouse, was playing. Dave, who has an almost perfect recall for time and place (especially when these involved sports) told me recently he has no recollection of the gathering.

The first meeting in the city went OK, especially since I was able to participate in the intermittent conversations about the game. When pressed, Scott told me his mother had called me a “minnow,” meaning, I think, that I was small and maybe that I moved around a lot. Other people had commented to me about these two aspects of my self-presentation, but none of them had been quite so poetic. It took me years to realize that Peg was not much taller than I; certainly by the time she reached 80 or so she was considerably shorter, although she still always offered to reach things for me from high shelves.

Peg’s big concern, though, was that I was an only child, meaning, I guess, that she was worried I might be selfish or stand-offish. She had no way of knowing about my six imaginary younger sisters about whom I have written in this blog, or about my almost insatiable desire to please. Although Scott’s family was not all that large—three brothers and a sister—it seemed to me like one of those clans from Victorian Family sagas à la Charlotte M. Younge. And all those clans had a sprawling homestead, usually a rambling house in the country. I felt very much like an only child as we hurtled down—or would it be up—the Valley road that evening in 1980.

And as an only child—because, after all, the sisters were imaginary—I remember feeling not only anticipation, but envy. This was a real family, the kind who celebrated holidays together at a big table, who had, if you included cousins, enough people to play croquet or even softball. Mostly the envy, though, had to do with place. I had lived in far more glamorous places than Etters, PA; when I tell people even now about my growing up, I can often see envy in their faces. But I never had a place to which I could return—an anchor, a homestead. My childhood home had come and gone with my childhood. Although we moved around far less than many families I know, our homes always felt temporary to me. Perhaps it is for that reason that I still treasure the objects that moved with us: the Chinese cabinet, the disintegrating rugs, the many, many art nouveau ashtrays that have outstayed their use.

As Scott had planned, I saw Three Mile Island before I saw the farm. I had seen so many pictures of the reactor at that point, and have seen so many more since then, so I am not sure if I am accurately remembering my first glimpse of the concrete towers reproduced on endless anti-nuke posters and paraphernalia. When I close my eyes, I feel the movement of the car over the Valley road and see looking towers in the dusk on the other side of a river. I am quite sure I remember lights, because these are never featured in photographs. Somehow the illumination, with its ghoulish festivity, made the towers all the more frightening. Many years later I would see similar lights from a different car also driven by Scott, long after Henry was committed to the junkyard. These would be the fairy lights that surround oil refineries on the Texas coast, and oil rigs deep in the Gulf. Strung out along the years, they signify for me the intimate dangers of place, the potential disasters surrounding the landscape I call home. On this evening of first encounters, I wasn’t sure how to process what I was seeing. “They are so big, “I said, “because I had to say something.” “I told you,” Scott answered, although at this stage in the relationship there was much he had not told me.

My memories of the visit are sketchy, most of them involving digging potatoes and helping Scott’s father to move out of his law office. Digging potatoes is hard. Despite being an only child, I threw my already wonky back into the job. Despite being a minnow, I moved heavy furniture. I also ate a lot of Peg’s delicious cherry pie. I learned that new potatoes are really small potatoes, and that big asparagus are more tender than small ones. While I cannot say that these things earned me full acceptance at that time, they began the process of entering the family and set the stage for the closeness and mutual respect that has marked my relation to my in-laws since the time of Reagan. Although Peg sold the farm many years ago, I still like to hear stories of its seasonal rhythms that the siblings tell each other when they get together: about basketball games in the barn and corn husked and rushed from field to pot to preserve its freshness. These are not my memories, but they have shaped my memory. Although I never feel that I lived on the farm, I feel, not quite vicariously, the comforting presence of a homestead.

It was probably a few months after my visit that Scott told me about a second sister, Roberta, who had died of leukemia when Scott was three years old. Roberta was four when she died.  Peg was pregnant with his sister Sue, and Scott became the eldest child. While we do not have a farm in Houston, we do plant many things, among them the blush pink “Roberta” rose. When our house by Braes Bayou flooded, we looked for another Roberta plant  for our new home, only to find that the powers-that- be in the strange world of rose cultivation had changed the name of “Roberta” to “Heritage.”  She is flourishing, under her new name, in our front bed squarely in the path of hummingbirds as they fly north from the Gulf, from our current home to Pennsylvania.