Chapter 1 - Zeroing Life's Odometer

We saw what had been our suburburban home since twenty Thanksgivings ago receding for the last time in the rear-view mirror of our overloaded old van, as the bank's eviction man finished up his obligatory inspection photographs and put a lockbox on what used to be our front door. Good luck with that – I remembered when our 12-year-old son had kicked it in frame an all, frustrated when he forgot his key. Crammed to the ceiling of the van with that very last load were all the things that we had literally waited until the last minute to pack while the eviction man waited in his truck – brooms, mops dustpans, bags of trash that we weren't allowed to leave behind (gotta remember which is which - trash bags are the luggage of the modern poor), good coats from the front closet, tools, cable modem & wireless router, a vintage picnic basket, the coffee pot & beans & grinder, some extra cement blocks, books and more books (you know me), my pellet gun, a big tin of dried garbanzo beans. A strange assortment. The eviction man had sat in his truck and watched me load it as the clocked ticked towards the appointed 10 a.m. final inspection. Marcy was strapped in the shotgun seat, her wheelchair packed in last by the back cargo door, then up top went the extension ladder, shovel, rake, two-wheel dolly, and a floor lamp. I gave thumbs-up to the eviction man and checked the time. 10:02, it's all good. I forgot to bring rope but a length of TV cable secured the rear while my good extension cord looped around the front bumper. It seemed a bit loose so a toilet-plunger acted as a tourniquet to tighten the lashings to hold the load secure enough to get through the hills & curves that lay ahead. What a fine hood ornament it made! Like the Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, or like the Okies in The Grapes Of Wrath, it seems fitting that we should start the next phase of our lives in Okeana, Ohio. Adios, slumburbia!

Okeana. Not where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, but the rolling farm country where I grew up. The first home I remember, where we lived in the new basement while Mom & Dad built their brick ranch-style house on a little chunk of land carved off the corner of my grandparents' larger chunk. Mom & Dad had finally sold their place and retired down to Tennessee, but Nannie still kept her house, and there, on that ground my feet had trod thousands of times, awaited an old RV (built in 1984, same year Marcy & I were married) that we had bought off Craigslist with a little money liberated from my retirement fund. We dubbed it the Rusty Vagabond, and we cleaned it and patched it and patched it some more out in front of that suburban home, packed the galley cabinets with rice and beans and sardines, packed other storage spaces with as much of other belongings as we could move safely without tossing around, poured in as much transmission fluid as we had on hand, jump-started it, and chugged it out to Nannie's, safely out of the way while we finished up the foreclosure process. It was so familiar there, the way the light slanted through the leafless trees. I could look out the back window of the RV and see where my tractor-tire sandbox used to sit under the big hickory, the garden patch where Dad taught me how to plant tomatoes, and the yard where we had our wedding rehearsal dinner, all just shifted slightly over, like the world had turned a bit under my feet when I wasn't looking.

The first night there we tumbled exhausted onto that funny RV mattress with the cutoff corner, under piles of quilts and afghans and even an old mink coat that had belonged to Marcy's mom. We snuggled together against the cold, a single electric heater laboring feebly on the sink beside the bed. A cup left nearby had unmelted ice in it the next morning, and not just condensation but thick frost on the outside of it. But it was worth it when I stepped outside and looked up at that sky full of a million stars and the Milky Way splashed across it, and then old Mr Enderle's rooster crowed next door. Good morning, Okeana!