crystal-clear

I will be eternally grateful to my mother for raising me on the fiddle and good home-baked bread. Sometimes I think that instead of being born, she must have grown up through the ground like a tree. Her skin is weathered and brown from working outside both for a living and for pleasure. Cooking was never her passion, but I see her satisfaction when she takes a perfect pie from the oven and sets it to cool on the kitchen table. She taught me all about pie crusts and kneading bread. She would let the dough rise in her biggest stainless steel bowl until it nearly overflowed the edges. She would take it warm from the oven rack, rest it on the oven door, let us punch it down with our tiny fists and pinch off a yeasty corner to eat before she rolled it up with a strong-veined hand, re-kneaded, and started the process again.

She also gave me the fiddle, even though she’s never played. My weekly piano lesson trips were always accompanied by radio country, and back then it was the good stuff. Clint Black, Reba McIntire, Randy Travis. They may’ve even still let Johnny Cash on the airwaves once in a while. My mother always paused for a live banjo or fiddle, always turned up loud the songs that featured them, and even though we’ve never lived anywhere near Appalachia, I feel like I grew up with a little of the magic of the Smokies inside me.

Food and music: still two of my favorite things in the whole wide world. And, I’ve found, two of the most important things for making a house a home. When I think about my future, it always starts, “When I have a house…” I feel like there’s a House in my future, waiting to claim me. I don’t know how long I’ll live there–perhaps it’s not even just one house, but a general concept of a space of my own–but there are a few things I’m certain it will have. Fresh bread on the counter, philodendrons and spider plants on the windowsills, and music of all kinds. A few more: strong coffee, Saturday mornings without alarm clocks, bookcases, a dog, and extra chairs for friends.

When I was teaching in Europe, my textbooks were in British English. A common British expression is “safe as houses,” which I didn’t understand at first, but which made more sense as I thought about it. The things we associate with houses, the things I just described, are more than just objects: they’re symbols of communion, protection, safety, friendship. A house keeps you out of the rain, warm under a roof with people you love. “Safe as houses” makes all the sense in the world.