X Marks the Spot
I’m a sucker for travel writing. All different kinds. My obsession began a long time ago with Charles Kuralt’s essays and progressed to William Least Heat Moon’s “Blue Highways”. I haunt travel sections in book stores and libraries. I will devour a book about someone slogging through the swamps of Guyana or exploring the Arctic. I like Ian Frazier’s books and exhausted myself mentally traveling with him in a Volkswagen bus across Russia. I’m partway through a book written back in 1934 by someone named Freya Stark, about her travel as a lone woman in a remote part of Iran. She was essentially in search of prehistoric graves to rob, which to me seems not only unethical and immoral, but more than a little creepy. She figured if she didn’t collect these artifacts for a museum, someone else would plunder the graves. (I may not finish this one.} Out of sheer determination I read all 1,100 pages of Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb Grey Falcon”, although it took about a year and a half, plowing through just a few pages a night. In Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping”, I was enchanted with the idea of people who are genetically infected in a way, with wanderlust. People who choose a nomadic life. Not homeless. Nomadic. My son has a friend who works as a substitute teacher and divides his time between schools in very different parts of the country. During the Depression in this country, hobos marked houses with an “X”, to tell others that a good woman lived there. Someone who would give them a meal and maybe even offer a place to sleep. One of my friends told me her grandmother was one of those women in the 1930’s. That same friend had a homeless person knock on her door not very long ago and ask if she minded if he spent the night on her front porch. She lives alone and times have changed so she declined but said to me, “I wonder if my grandma would have been disappointed.” Years ago when we lived in Texas I was convinced the picket fence in front of our house must have had some sort of feline version. Cats turned up repeatedly and for a while there were seven of them trying to sponge off us.
Photo courtesy dimitrisvetsikas1969 at Pixabay.com
