Extra Innings (32 page)

For me: At long last, I have overcome my sense of displacement and homelessness, my need to find the one place to which I feel I belong. To which I come with a sense of inevitable return. The place I leave, even for a few hours, with regret. I take pleasure at every vista from these windows: ‘Everywhere you look there is something to see,' as Ted Nowick once observed. I feel a foolish nostalgia for the sight of the Cove when I go as far away as the post office or the local store. Homesick? Looking out of every window toward the sea, I know where home is.

I remember the Sisters at Saint Rose had a clear idea of its location. One early morning one of them stopped me in the breakfast line to tell me of the death of an elderly nun that night. She smiled as she said: ‘Sister Rosaleen has gone home to God.'

I am now prepared to see my life as a journey to arrive here. It has been a somewhat narrow, constrained, unadventuresome trip to this place where I am, for the time being, home free, for good. Finally, of course, there will be the last expedition when I am ‘called back,' in Emily Dickinson's phrase. Shakespeare's metaphor for death: ‘The latest home.' Mary Oliver's image for death: ‘that cottage of darkness.'

English sermons of the fourteenth century speak of death as ‘the long home.'

An elderly acquaintance whose permanent home in her late years has been Brooklin, Maine, said at tea the other day, while reviewing her life: ‘We lived temporarily in Chicago for twenty-five years.'

In games nomenclature, the fourth, final, and scoring base in baseball is home plate; crossing it is a home run.… In hide-and-seek, the place safe from discovery is home. The object of backgammon is to bring the counters round to your own home.

Home for me might have been an apartment, a condominium in a high-rise building, a brownstone looking beyond parked cars and streams of traffic to another brownstone. A ranch house in the suburbs with a manicured lawn indistinguishable from the ones on either side. A room in a boardinghouse, a shelter: in one of these places I might have spent the seventh segment of my life.

But Fortune has provided me with a rocky Cove off a Reach, a meadow, two shallow woods, one great oak and a towering horse chestnut tree, a huge, immovable rock that sits, in Maine fashion, in the middle of a scrabby lawn, a deck (substitute for a ship's side) that is attached to the house and stretches toward the water.

Together with this parochial gift, it gave me more: an interior landscape made of serenity, isolation, solitude: the flowering desert of the heart, the mountains (and valleys) of mind, the pools of imagination. Perhaps I am truly at home when I am at peace with myself, surrounded by the serenity that comes from the Cove, a quiet so deep I am able to hear the roar of the sea in my inner ear, to see in my mind's eye absent friends as well as the dead I have loved, to taste on the buds of fantasy the great meals I am no longer able to digest, to restore the scraps of a quiescent past long buried in my memory by an overactive present.

I live in these landscapes. Here I dwell secure, looking inward to learn the ancient, neglected truths about myself, and outward to find God in this small piece of the beautiful world I have been granted, and in my fellow human beings nearby. I celebrate what I have, but sometimes mourn what has been lost in the world. For I take to heart what Robert Finch wrote: A celebrant of nature is now forced to become a ‘writer of epitaphs for moribund places … one who speaks well of the dead or dying … [I] celebrate things that no longer are.…'

I have been lucky. I did not find this place too soon, too early. (For if I had, I might face the danger of losing it and not being able to come home again. I might have been expelled, or transported, or exiled from it.)

Ecclesiastes contains a good metaphor. Worthless, vain ambition is said to be ‘chasing the wind.' In another translation it is rendered as ‘a striving after wind.' To be home is to stop chasing the wind. To know thy place.

And knowing it, to learn to sit still. Here. For the time being.

Sargentville, Maine

About the Author

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including
Fifty Days of Solitude
,
Life in a Day
,
The Ladies
, and
Chamber Music
, has been literary editor of the
New Republic
, a nonfiction columnist for the
New York Times Book Review
, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

“To Waken an Old Lady” and excerpt from “January Morning” from
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
, Vol. I. Copyright © 1938 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from
The Collected Poems
by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Excerpt from “One Art” from
The Complete Poems 1927–1979
by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from “Sprung Lamb” and “Southern Comfort” by Felicia Lamport from
Political Plumlines
by Felicia Lamport. Copyright © 1984 by Felicia Lamport. Reprinted by permission of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2000 by Doris Grumbach

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7663-3

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