While completing a crossword puzzle recently, I came across the clue “Get Lost.” Scat, scram, scoot, skedaddle — all either too short or too long. The answer turned out to be two heartbreaking words: “GO HOME”.

For a moment, though, didn’t you also conjure up sepia-toned images of Depression-era city kids skittering around on a vacant lot? Their stickball game forgotten, their childish indignation and scorn focused on a companion, that day’s scapegoat.

Get lost? Go home? In an ideal world, wouldn’t home be precisely the place where you could be found? Your place of origin, source of identity, your nest?

Grace Paley, in her richly warm and deeply engaging poem, House: Some Instructions, reveals much about the extensive connections between house and owner. From the very beginning, she sets up the connection as relationship:

If you have a house
you must think about it all the time
as you reside in the house so
it must be a home in your mind …

All the time, you carry the beloved in mind and heart, trusting the same is also true for them. This could (should?) be said, also, of lovers, partners, spouses, parents and children, dear friends, kin of all sorts. Regardless of actual location, there is never a time when those in relation are not connected.

She goes on to list many essential features of the house itself — doors and pipes, faucets and drains — as well as important qualities worth maintaining: ample heat (“carefully nurtured”) and adequate humidity (“vaporizers in each room and pots / of water on the woodstove”). Pipes and people alike must be prevented from freezing; the warmth of the fire nourishes. On the other hand, care must be exercised at every turn, for flames (both tended and untended) are a two-edged sword –

… the fiery result of excited distraction
could be too horrible to describe …

– so it is essential to forever sustain a balance between too little and too much, an evenness that preserves habitat and inhabitants alike.

Guests are welcome, of course, but always with a thought (should it be necessary) for their enlightenment:

… you may tell your friends to consider

your house as their own that is
if they do not wear outdoor shoes

when thumping across the gleam of their poly-
urethaned floors they must bring socks or slippers

to your house as well …

This poem serves as a framework for a philosophy of wholesome living, a manual of practical instruction (rugs, blankets), and a guide to a down-to-earth etiquette. What do you make of a place with a working wood stove and thoroughly wrapped pipes and doors that creak open and doorframes that droop and paint that is beyond its prime? That’s a place where outdoor shoes are at home, no delicate slipper-scuffed surfaces to be found.

Those closest to your heart, you remember them, whether you are nearby or afar. They are never absent from mind or heart; you look forward to greeting them again one day — “House! in the excitement of work and travel … we thought of you often …”

Relationships are shaped in time and by time — years pass and foundations settle and paint is no longer new as it acquires “the colors of un- / intentioned neglect”. Time happens.

Lost? Go home.

____________________

Grace Paley (1922-2007), lifelong poet and writer of short stories, is also remembered as a teacher and activist. Her published works were relatively few, but her empathetic heart and sense of justice were vast. In a thoughtfully autobiographical interview with The Paris Review in 1992, she offered a ‘philosophy of life’ that encompassed her interests:

Occasionally she will admit that, though it is “not nice” of her to say so, she believes that she can accomplish as much in a few stories as her longer-winded colleagues do in a novel. And she points out that she has had many other important things to do with her time, such as raising children and participating in politics. “Art,” she explains, “is too long, and life is too short.”

Her final book of poetry (which included selections from her earlier two collections) is Begin Again: Collected Poems.

(“Old wood” from árticotropical / Leonardo Aguiar / cc by)