More of What I Miss (of Home)

The camper. This one surprises me, because although my family camped a lot, most of what I remember took place in the trailer–which, although still modest, was much nicer and larger and more accommodating.

The old camper still sits in my parents’ yard next to the shed. It’s too old and run-down to really sell–the frame dented in places, paint peeling, brown leather seats ripped, cupboard latches stuck–but I’m not sure why they keep it. I don’t know when it was made or remember where it came from, but it might have been a hand-me-down from my grandparents. The wood looked cheap–not-quite-honey-colored; the walls were canvas, the floor fake marble, the curtains retro checkered-green. Everything else was brown, including the tiny refrigerator–which had a lock made out of a screw that simply dropped through a hole in a metal loop (something that fascinated me as a child). It was the only thing I could easily open and close, and I felt the need to lock it–maybe as a retaliation, because at that age the cupboard latches already stuck–and everything was latched.

As a child I remember our camping trips feeling more foreign, even though most of them probably took place at Fraser Lake, B.C., not that far from where I lived. We always spent much more time outside the camper, in the water (often trying to wrestle in the dog, who couldn’t stand it), around the fire pit, looking for agates in the sand to fill the bear-shaped peanut butter jar which probably contained more sanded glass and translucent rocks than anything else. I remember once, though, parking the truck (camper fit snugly on the back) next to a large cabin out in the middle of nowhere, ready for visitors and equipped with nothing but a board game involving either elephants or hippos, and parachutes or other floating devices. And I will never forget Germansen Lake, where the “outhouse” was made of boards, a hole, and dirty curtains, where the water was far too cold to swim in, where we were isolated from humankind and the rain came in torrents for seven days straight. Never would I develop a more intimate relationship with that camper.

(This is unfinished. Have much more to say.)

Die

An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.

Tell me what you will miss when you die.

I don’t get homesick.  I left my parents, my brother and the house I grew up in almost five years ago.  I don’t cry.  I don’t yearn to go back more than once a year, at most, or call them as often as I should.  But there are things I miss.

The drinking water.  Our water supply comes from a well just outside the town, and we have a special tap to filter it just for drinking.  For more than ten years that water has found a home in a glass jug in the refrigerator, a jug all my friends would tell you makes it too cold, condensation coating the glass.  But the water is perfect–well worth the temperature and straws for my sensitive teeth.  The only comparable taste I’ve experienced was the cascading glacier water that filled my hands on my eighth grade field trip.

The glass jug is tall and narrow and too small to hold enough daily water for four, and I’ll often find it sitting on the counter empty, the last recipient (undoubtedly my father or brother) too lazy to refill it.  After all these years, now just a visitor in that house, this still frustrates me, but I remove the cracked white lid and place that jug in the sink, lift the lever on the drinking tap, and wait.  The tap is long and very narrow, like a heavy-duty extension cord, and it takes a minute to fill the jug.  Imagine, then, the wait and frustration when my mother–well-intentioned as she is–insists on depleting the water pressure to fill an entire spaghetti pot, in fear that the regular tap water is still contaminated from the advisory seven years back, and that in this unlikely event, the rolling boil will fail to kill the bacteria before she cooks the noodles, removes them from the pot, and sends perfectly good drinking water funneling down the drain.  But I stand by the tap and wait anyway–the water stream limp as a ribbon–as it cascades into the jug.

When I die, I imagine I’ll miss that water–the taste, the memory.  Almost as much as I’ll miss the empty jug, the pot, the liquid pirouetting down the sink.