Who's Home?

I was born in a city.  Not a real city, just one of those urban approximations which flicker across the map for a minute, briefly important, and then fade.  My city was ‘briefly important’ for its steel.  We were one of the most prominent producers of the stuff in the world, and then, one day, the mill went defunct.  Thousands of people lost their jobs and left the city, leaving it - not actually particularly less bustling - but at least less influential.  That’s the story I remember, at least.  It could be a complete fiction.  If it is, it isn’t any less real than the truth.  

I want to be in the city.  The real city, not the type I grew up in.  I cannot imagine surviving for long without the effervescent glimmer of lights late at night, the sumptuous boutiques where I can pretend, for a minute, to be special, pretty, rich, important.  If the cement surrogates get a little too bleak, a little too grim, I can escape, for A Minute Only, to the circuitous confines of a museum thrown together from the racket with the best humanity has to offer (at least for now).  An interconnected, undefined, riddle or riff of a time and place so indeterminable as to be impossible.  A call to the void.  A ritual of the human.  

I live in the country.  Proper country.  The people act like people, kind if they don’t know you and kind if they do.   Humanity persists here.  The paper mill went out of service long ago, and the hotel burnt down, and our town is left with some-odd two hundred residents.  My mother visits the neighbor most days, since he had a heart attack.  I make pies on the weekends, when I have time, with the apples I pick from the tree that was here before we moved.  Quaint.  It’s quaint.  

I love my home.  I don’t think it matters which one.  I love each place.  Not equally.  I don’t think love is designed like that.  Still, I know the value of each.  I love each.  Because each could be my home, because each is a home.  It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s mine.  Humanity doesn’t care, it only persists to keep on caring, where humans remain and where humans exist.  Such is only nature.