THANKS GIVEN FOR A PLACE TO CALL HOME

`Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home' - Thoreau

The time of the tender twilights and beautiful sunsets is upon us. Dusk falls like a soft benediction on the day. A sweet sense of coming home to rest and revitalize for another day descends over the city.

Even if you've been home all day you feel it. The children with their book bags descend from the busses and hurry indoors - free at last! Home! Maybe such home is a mansion in the suburbs, maybe a humble abode along the river bank. No matter. It's home. Familiar walls, floors, doorknobs, faces, a place to venture out from, to return to.

Even if you're not coming home yourself, you note neighbors' cars turning into home driveways, their occupants home from the office, the factory, or wherever, and although you may have only a nodding acquaintance with such neighbors, there is a sense of all is well, everyone's at home.

It's sometimes called rush hour, this coming home, and may entail traffic jams, impatient drivers and bumped bumpers. But when you think of this rush hour as eagerness to get home, you're more forgiving.

In early years when my life was entangled with farm animals, chickens, dogs and cats, it was a comfortable, satisfying feeling, when the cold nights came, to know that they were all cared for. The chicken house door was shut. The horses and cows were in their straw-bedded stalls. The barn cats were in their rounded out beds in the hay loft. Sometimes old Tabby, the house cat, was late in leaping to the pantry roof, from there to the attic window with the broken pane, into the attic, and to her rounded out bed in a pile of rags. Some nights I lay awake, waiting to hear Tabby make this move. When she did, I felt free to go to sleep.

Now I watch the dusk creep across the back yard. It thickens first down in the far corner behind the maple trees. Shadows of buildings keep the light from the flushed western sky from penetrating there. In defiance, the mound of golden maple leaves at the foot of the trees seem to make their own light, but only for a little while. The shadows continue to deepen along the back border. The forsythia bushes and mock orange recede into smoky grayness as if a dark eraser is being wiped across them. A tabby cat disappears into a garage.

A few late birds come to the feeders then fly away to wherever night shelter may be. Members of the wildlife community are so adept at finding nighttime shelters. Humans were too, I suppose, way back in time. Caves, mud huts, dried grass lean-tos, stretched animal skins over poles, and on up. I suppose "up." Maybe there was a magic time when "up" should have ceased to be because of the danger of "up-itis."

"Up-itis?" It is just a new word I've coined for my own lexicon. I give you the right to define it. But I think it has something to do with the origin of the homeless.

Come to think of it, I did, at one time, know of some humans who were adept at finding a home at night, much as a member of the wildlife community would. These were the homeless hoboes who traveled the Belmont Railroad tracks, along the same stretch that Lou and I walked to school. On our way to school we would see a thin spiral of woodsmoke coming from beneath an overhanging cliff near the river, or a little sheltered place under a trestle. We tiptoed by softly, but on our way home we might inspect the place, finding the cold ashes and maybe a few spilled coffee grounds.

The railroad tramps were always men, never women. So, when I eventually read Padraic Colum's poem, "Old Woman of the Road," I was surprised that there were old women of the road. Perhaps in the time between my early school days and the writing of the poem women demanded equal opportunities! Bag ladies of today?

Colum's old woman of the road was tired of the cold, wind and rain. She longed for a little house with a shelf to hold speckled blue and white dishes and a ticking clock. She wanted a hearth and a stool and a bed. Och! she was tired of the mist and dark and lonesome road.

Something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? "A little house . . . out of the wind's and rain's way," to come home to at the end of day.

REJOICE!