Home at Last

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I’ve thought a good deal about what it means to be ”home” over the years. My parents always called Las Vegas “home,” though most of their more than 50 years of marriage was spent in other parts of the country at one military base or another. But both their extended families were early settlers in Southern Nevada, so at least every couple of years when my dad had leave, we loaded the car and headed for the southwest to see grandparents, aunts and uncles, and my favorite—a dozen cousins near the ages of my siblings and me.

I’ve lived in the forests beside Lake Michigan, the planes of Texas, the fertile lands of Central California, the arroyos sheltering the rich cultural heritage of New Mexico, and shores of the Chesapeake Bay. All of them beautiful beyond description. But when I come home, I still come to the red dust of Southern Utah and the deserts of Nevada.

My dad’s mother, twice widowed before she was 40, was the local midwife for the small towns in Moapa Valley. When her four sons outgrew the local elementary school, she moved to a little house in the growing community of Las Vegas where they could get a high school education. My dad’s oldest brother married my mother’s aunt, a complicated relationship which, when my parents married, made that aunt and uncle’s six children both my first and second cousins!

Eventually, Uncle Earl–and a couple of my mother’s uncles (confused yet? Imagine me as a six-year-old trying to figure out those relationships!) brought a cattle ranch on the outskirts of town. It became tradition that whenever our family was in town, my brothers and I headed to the ranch for a few days of unfettered freedom from the rules of military life. We rode horses at breakneck pace between the giant cactus, played “Kick the Can” under the light of a million stars till the wee hours of the morning, did chores I never even knew existed till I spent time on the ranch, and talked and teased until the sun rose over the mountain. Halcyon days, indeed.

One afternoon when the temperature was over 100 degrees again, we complained to my uncle that it was hotter than an oven (his son actually used the forbidden word “hell”) outside. My uncle grinned and said, “Well, fix it.” So, we went to work. With the 12 kids who lived on the ranch, my brothers and I, and a couple of town cousins, there turned out to be quite labor force. We laid out a rough rectangle in the dirt behind the two houses (the only grass for a couple of miles being the two patches on the front lawns of the houses which overlooked the valley); then we started to dig. I was not particularly helpful. Spending a lot of solitary time reading does not build work muscles, but I remember hauling dirt and scowling at my cousin Mike, who was bossing us around.

If memory serves, the boys finally got annoyed at the hard labor and brought in the ranch backhoe. It took a couple of days, but the hole turned into a 4 foot-deep, 12 foot wide by 16- or 18-foot-long trench, which we filled with water and dubbed a “swimming pool’. We let the hose run into it a couple of days, but as soon as there was an inch or two of water, we were wading and splashing as if we were playing on the shores of the Pacific. Now, considering the scarcity of water in the desert, I am astonished at the generosity of the adults around us who must have exhibited extraordinary self-control to allow us to “waste” so much of the precious commodity on such frivolity.

At some point the aunts must have gotten tired of the mud-caked kids traipsing through the house for treats and drinks because when I came back the next time, there was a rough concrete covering over walls of desert dirt. No fancy circulation system, no diving board, no chemicals to meet sanitation standards. Just the “hole” and a pipe which now ran from the air conditioning over-flow into the pool to re-purpose whatever water possible.  

Today the ranch is gone–the land fallen victim to the millions of dollars it was worth to the rapidly expanding city whose tendrils reached out and enveloped the hundreds of acres it took to fed a herd of cattle in the desert. Now an LDS temple stands where I fell off my cousin’s stallion when he slapped  his horse’s rump even before I was settled in the saddle, and the horse took off at breakneck speed, dumping me in a convenient cactus on the way. (I can still hear my cousin John’s laughter rolling along behind me!)

Despite the remarkably beautiful places I have lived over the years (including the Salt Lake Valley), I now understand that my “real” home isn’t a place. It’s a feeling–a sense of safety and belonging. It’s where grandmothers know the best recipes for cherry pies and homemade ice cream. Or uncles know the secret holes in the river when the trout hide on hot summer afternoons. Or wherever the people who matter most to each of us wait for our arrival with open arms—be it a third story walk-up in a crowded city or the wheat fields of a dry farm in Texas. Home is where, if we are lucky, memories of love surround us. And when we breathe deeply, we unconsciously release our troubles–because we are “home” at last.