Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

When I am feeling down, I Google my childhood home. I put in the address and it usually pops up on the page on Zillow or some house-buying site even though it’s not for sale at the moment. And there’s a picture of the front, the garage, the second floor addition my grandfather built, and the high fence the new owners built. The inside has been renovated nicely, but there’s still the fireplace that my stepmother painted white and I almost lost my mind because it had always just been brick-colored brick and then it was white brick and even then I didn’t like change.

There’s the back deck and the small studio where my mother used to make her ceramics. There’s no picture of the garden, but I bet you could make one. I’ve always wanted to own it, though most likely I never will. There’s something about the idea of returning to it, to make it my home again, that’s intriguing. And maybe it would be strange or too emotional or maybe it would collapse the timeline too much in my mind. The traffic’s probably too loud, the wildfire threats are real. But I had good memories in that house and yes, every once in a while, it goes on the market at some outrageous California price I could never afford and I joke with my husband about buying it. I want it to always be mine, even though it already always is, in my mind. My first home…it looms large in the cells of my body.

In today’s poem we see that connection to place, and how grieving a place can be like grieving the past.

Your Damage
by Mary Biddinger

Some days the lake eats your face. Some days the car eats the key. Other days you deposit ten minutes of sob
into a trash can. Your childhood home will not be yours again.  You won’t walk out of those woods you wish you
never  entered.  Much  of your  early adulthood,  and mine,  was coming up  with innovative ways  to vomit,  and
then innovative ways not to vomit.  My roommate holds my face steady,  pushes the earplug in with a flick,  like
fake eyelashes. Fans my waterlogged childhood books on the fire escape, pausing to flip through the one with
owls  in tight sweaters.  I’m in a  striped cotton dress  without shoes  or a bra.  Maybe  it’s  evening.  Tankard  of
Pedialyte. Ghost cat stepping across my chest. Everything inside burns.  You have to remember this was back
when we had to take cabs, so we take a cab.  My roommate tells me the bangle bracelet is a Sea-Band.  Puts a
wig over my hair  and an all-day  sucker in  my hand,  like going to a rave.  Jams my  heels into  heels.  Drags  my
heels into the cab. When we reach my childhood home,  which probably looks very much like yours,  we realize
we brought nothing to throw.  So  I throw my voice around every tree,  into the chimney my father built,  across
the yard where my ghost dog still ghosts.

"Your Damage" by Mary Biddinger. Originally published in Adroit. Used by permission of the poet.