Home is a State of Mind

I’m 7 years old, rolling down the truck window with the crank. It takes every bit of strength in my small arms, but finally, I accomplish the task. The sky is clear and blue. A hawk soars across it. The engine revs and my father and I travel down a series of long and winding country roads. I cross my arms and lean my head out the window. Black-eyed Susans bloom in a ditch overrun by tall, tangled weeds. Dust circles through the air. I listen to the gravel spin beneath the wheels, feel the jar of an unavoidable pothole, and hear my father remark, “when’s the last time they grated this road?”. We cross “city limits”. “City” is a term loosely used in this case. We do our shopping at a tiny grocery store off the main road, the one with the concrete floor painted a sickly pea green hue. I have visions of strapping on a pair of roller skates and whirring down those green-yellow aisles, jars of pickles and peanut butter flying by. My father shakes his head, “you have a porch at home for roller skating”. He places a sack of sugar in the cart. We buy only what we need; sugar, eggs, cornmeal, coffee…only what we need, save the candy bars we grab at the checkout counter. My father has a sweet tooth and he’s passed it on to me. The candy bars don’t make it home. We scarf them down in the parking lot, then head home, picking up stations on the radio, mostly country, here and there, where the antenna allows.  

“Leena! I’m not paying you to sit out here and daydream, am I?” says Candy, standing in the doorway, a veiny hand placed on each hip.  

I look down at my own hands and notice the ash of my cigarette is nearing an inch long.  

“No, ma’am,” I reply as I stomp my cigarette out against the hot concrete and return to work. 

I’m a waitress at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. How did I get here? I ask myself this question at least three times a day. A couple of years ago, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two women at a table I waited on. One of them was going through an especially nasty divorce from what I gathered. At one point in the conversation, she started to cry. Between sobs, she said she’d foolishly believed she was in control of her own destiny, when in reality she had very little power over anything that actually mattered. Life had been, as she put it, “a beautiful, painful illusion”. Lately, I’ve been wondering if she was right. I mean, here I am, spinning my wheels for reasons unbeknownst to myself, at a job I once referred to as, “just a gig to tide me over”. Five days a week I serve up scorched black coffee and sloppy plates of food. I wipe down greasy tables and ignore any and all oglers. Most of the customers I wait on are men; road weary truckers, for obvious reasons, or old desert hippies, predominantly bachelors but moreover, loners. It must be the promise of a home cooked meal that brings them in off the highway. “Food just like mom used to make”, according to the billboard, which is a nice way of saying we haven’t been replaced by a Subway or a Taco Bell yet. The truckers order plates of chicken fried steak or meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, choice of creamed corn or green beans, both of which are generally substituted, 9 times out of 10, for an additional side of mashed potatoes and gravy, plus a dinner roll to mop it all up with. The old hippies order the veggie plate; pinto beans,choice of creamed corn or green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, a dinner roll to mop it all up with, and a side salad consisting of stale iceberg lettuce and an always impossible to open packet of italian dressing. Same old same old, day in day out, but every once in a while an unexpected traveler wanders in through the door.  

Last New Year’s Day, a man walked in carrying a beat up guitar case. He carefully sat it down next to him in the booth and later took it with him to the mensroom. He wore a flashy diamond ring on his right hand. He commented on my blonde hair and brown eyes, calling it a “unique combination”. He went on to say that I had the face of an actress in a Fellini film. I had no idea what a Fellini film was or who any of the actresses were but it sounded like a compliment, so I thanked him. He left me a hundred dollar bill as a tip. His phone number was folded up inside it, scrawled out on a coffee stained napkin, just above the words, “Call me”. I made the mistake of telling another waitress. Word of the hundred dollar bill spread quickly throughout the truck stop. Candy insisted I divide it up with the rest of the staff, whom, she said, “did all the real work, anyway”, and pay off a past debt from the time a trucker stiffed me. When all was said and done, I took home a total of $13.63. I barely made rent that month. I tucked the traveler’s number away in my wallet and there it stayed. I never called. He’s probably forgotten me by now.   

Lately, I tend to keep to myself. I’m the kind of person who can’t handle heartbreak and besides, I like my own company. If I’m not at work, I’m at home and home is nothing if not a state of mind, a small space in the world you carve out just for yourself. 

I rent a one room apartment across from the old railroad station. It's nice enough for what it is. I painted the walls a misty shade of lilac called “Mountain Haze” and filled the space with plants and trinkets I’ve collected over the years, traveling across the country. I’ve gotten used to being woken up in the middle of the night by the train racing down the track, causing the entire apartment building to shake from the ground up. I used to clutch the covers around my neck and lay there, terrified, eyes wide open, scanning the dark room until it passed. Now, I throw on a jacket over my pajamas, step out onto the patio and watch the train roll by. Fear is both a robber and a thief and the desert night is far too strange and beautiful to miss. Here, the days are sunbleached, reducing all objects to flat, colorless surfaces. Night is when you see. Mysterious shapes and shadows take form. Last night, I thought I saw a great, forested mountain rising in the distance and rows of swaying sunflowers, like my father used to grow, gathering around it. I blinked twice and it all disappeared. The desert lay still and quiet once more. 

I keep on the lookout for signs from my father. I sometimes question whether or not they’re really there. Maybe I'm just making them up in my mind or assigning meaning to things that don’t actually exist.  

Dad was a farmer and a mechanic. He grew towering sunflowers that kept watch over the rest of the garden, lush with corn, leaf lettuce, squash and tomatoes. He ran cattle and fostered a whole mess of “outdoors cats” to keep the mice away. He could fix any car, truck, or tractor or at least get it running well enough to get you wherever you were headed. He grew up in the mountains, where his family had planted 7 generations worth of roots. After leaving for a 7 year stint, he returned home with his new wife and consequently, I was born and raised in the same mountains. 

Growing up, most of what I knew of my mother came from a single photograph taken the day before she left for the U.S.. In it, she stood next to a twisted and ancient olive tree, the earth appeared golden that day and the sky, a bright blazing blue. She wore a plain white dress with a thin green stripe. Her dark hair was cropped, neatly, just below her chin. We shared the same dark eyes. I couldn't remember a time when mom’s photo hadn’t hung above the fireplace mantel or a time when I hadn’t studied it, imagining her running her hand over the rough tree bark and through the gentle leaves that hung overhead. She’d turn and take a few steps forward to gaze out over the land, the only land she’d ever known, the land she called home. A warm breeze would blow out of nowhere, ruffling her hair, which would always fall, perfectly, back into place. Then, she would stand beside the olive tree, once more, frozen in time.  

Years went by and dad never mentioned mom. I tried many times to envision her in the mountains but the image refused to take shape. Dad took a loss on the farm two years in a row and eventually ended up selling all the cattle and over half of the family land. From there on out, his health spiraled downward. Storms hit the mountains hard in the last spring of his life. We spent a lot of time together, driving around the countryside taking in the damage; bridges out, fences down, trees pulled up by their roots. On nights he felt well enough, we’d stay up late talking. I finally asked him, in the gentlest way I knew how, why we’d never talked about mom. He held his head in his hands.  

 “Always keep moving forward, Leena,” he said. 

A gust of wind blew, causing the old farmhouse to shake. The photo of my mother swayed back and forth over the mantlepiece.  

“I will, dad.”