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H O M E
Jami Lunde
03.08.10











I am sitting here drinking a cup of old cold tea in a frigid garage room apartment surrounded by a thousand pictures. Pictures that I am finally really able to look at. I've been working this week in a house that took a sledgehammer to the brick wall I built around my past. A house that made me never ever wants to leave. A House that I felt so reflected in, had my name written all over it and was painted in the perfect shades of my yesterdays… sea foams, persimmons, turquoises, creams, salmons and robin’s eggs. The house whose 15 foot tall, Italian plastered walls held chicken wire fence cabinets stuffed with colorful pillows that looked just like the ones I sewed all those years ago while sitting at my old Formica table surrounded by Hoosier cabinets filled with jars of spices, a pastry chef’s flour pantry and bottles of rare olive oils and vinegars. I sewed my own pillowcases that I cut from a bolt of vintage thick red and white ticking striped canvas I bought at a flea market in the Texas Hill Country.

Today this house wrapped its arms around me as I stood in the kitchen packing up well-worn, perfectly seasoned, heavy copper pans, half gallon sized mason jars filled with grains and flours, and hand painted plates. I imagined the owners, Richard and Charlotte, cooking hundreds of meals throughout the years as they drank from their voluminous paper thin wine glasses filled with expensive wines from their vast travels that they stored at the perfect temperature in the cellar. I remembered the nine years I spent waking up early to drive down the snowy roads to roll out home made croissant dough for families of skiers. I spent fifteen years cooking hundred of meals from scratch for my husband. But in the last three years I haven’t been able to even boil water. This house made me want to cook a meal again but I still felt just like a beaten dog undeserving of any love or happiness at all. I’ve always translated cooking with love. If there is no one to love there is no one to cook for. I have only allowed myself to cook a few times in the last three years: Once for Craig, my best friend who died in my arms, when he was too sick to eat and a couple stunning birthday cakes for some brand new friends. I never cook for myself. Mostly I just eat sushi from The Ideal Market in my car, alone, in between going to here and back from there, totally aware that I was the one who made this choice.


It's been almost 3 years that I kicked my own house with everyone and everything in it to the curb. A house that was born to us in one of our last springs; When I tied up a fat hen bird with cotton twine, stuffed with fresh rosemary, thyme and garlic, brushed with melted butter and Sauvignon Blanc, sprinkled with freshly ground pepper and coarse sea salt and roasted in a shiny new All Clad roasting pan filled with fingerling potatoes and whole little carrots as the curtains blew out the windows like clothes on a line. I remember we stood there toasting to our bright future in a house we now held the keys to in our hands. A house that we poured every cent into and that I lied awake in at night dreaming up new ways to make it look like the photographs of my past. Linens were starched, Ironed and placed on pharmacy- font labeled shelves. Rolls of gift-wrapping paper hung from dowels next to polka dotted ribbons and muted Easter egg shades of tissue paper. Closets had closets and were multi level. In my office I had an eight-foot long post office letter sorter that kept my hundreds of different weighted papers neatly organized and separate from my paint chip collection. Everything was ready for the Ready Made photo shoot. I spent two years making it look perfect. If it looked perfect then maybe we'd stand a chance.


I can't for the life of me figure out why Richard and Charlotte would ever sell this house that he built with his own hands 8 years ago. I just wanted to curl up on the aquamarine velvet couch and fall into the dozens of down stuffed soft pink and bright magenta pillows from far away lands and leaf through the New York Times left in the wire basket. I could spend the rest of my life under the lavender cashmere blanket, sipping jasmine tea and doing the cross word puzzle with an extra fine tipped black ink pen while watching the cottony snowflakes pile up one by one on the window sill. I wondered how I'd lived this long and never smelled the perfect fragrance of dianthus blossoms before from the candle burning the day light up on the table. If I didn't have to get back into my neglected car and go home looking for a new place to throw away the trash from my life in my garage room apartment in the backseat tonight, I wouldn't. Richard and Charlotte's black lab, Catfish, liked when I petted his velvety ears and he laid at my feet as I packed away their belongings. Maybe I could go home, pack a small bag, load up my Black Lab, Gibson and Jesse Maybelle, my Australian Shepard and sneak back in without missing a beat. I had done it before. Time was slipping away so I just tried to take it all in. I wondered if it was better to have had this love affair even briefly or if it would have just been better to not see what good living really was like again. The old is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all question... I'll always sign up for the it’s better to have loved and lost team no matter how many times I loose or how much it hurts in the long run.

I had brief flashes of the rooms in my old house as I wrapped each plate in clean large sheets of blank newsprint. The vortex I was being sucked back into was so forceful I had to pull my eyes back in as far as they’d go and brace my hand on the marble counter top for the explosion behind my eyes. I could barley look into the rooms that flashed as I was packing up Richard and Charlotte's Kitchen, so I packed the snapshots of my own memories in another box and I stored them in the attic of my mind right at the top of my stairs.

I went to sleep that night in my new bed made with borrowed sheets and found pillows and knew there was so much I still haven't said. I laid there in my duct taped down coat, a mid 90’s era synchilla hat, expedition weight long underwear pants and underneath the weight of five down comforters, the only real embrace I allow myself nowadays, closed my eyes on the day and I knew the time had come to go back and get right with all I had made wrong.

I woke with the sun beaming in through the cracks in the curtains and pulled the blankets up to my nose. I gave myself a few more minutes of the only comfort I've found in 3 years. I took a few deep breaths as I ignored my dogs that were sitting on the floor next to my bed sniffing my face. Apparently they didn't get the telepathic message I sent that I needed just 5 more minutes. I agreed that today would be the day I'd make the trip back up to the Ice Box of mountains that I called home for 15 years.

I turned on to the old diagonal dirt road like I did for years and slowly crept down the streets of our old neighborhood. Gravel popped under my tires as I drove past the house that my husband helped build for extra money in the mud season, past houses that weren't built yet when we lived there, past houses of couples we knew when we lived there. I remembered one of the women leaving her home and spouse after listening to me tell her 'well, this boy used to come into my bar everyday for 6 months and he'd just ask me over and over and over 'but are you happy?' And after really thinking about it, I realized that, as a matter of fact, I wasn't happy and I hadn't been in along time. I had slept most of the last 8 years on the couch and had four TVs in my house. So I left.’ I might have made it seem too easy. I looked the best I ever had. My skin glowed like a young girl in love. She probably wanted some of that too. I noticed her horses weren't in the coral anymore- but it still looked like her house. I knew she moved away a couple years ago. Just like me. She probably figured out too, that in time, the rosy cheeks faded into black circles under her eyes.

I came to the stop sign and read the letters on the street sign NEVAVA. Our old street. I remembered doing hundreds of drive bys before we actually got the keys. All the dreams we had. I could see our house from right there. I had forgotten that my husband had stained the house the summer before I left. A shade of dark sea foam. The old chicken wire fencing around the front yard had been taken down. The porch swing we bought at an antique store that I’d coax our chocolate and black lab up on to, still hung there on the cold porch that winter afternoon. I slowed down long enough to notice no one was home and I looked to the corner of the front yard where we buried my very favorite dog, Guthrie Beauregard. He was our chocolate lab who died while my husband ran him down an old ranch road along side of his car to give him some exercise one late night after he got home and watched as a truck ran him over in the dark. I always said to him ' please don't run the dogs/ please don't run the dogs at night/ please don't run the dogs at night down that old ranch road/ and please if you do run the dogs down the old ranch road at night and you see another car coming, please get the dogs back in the car.’ He didn't ever seem to think I had any good ideas. I remembered holding Guthrie's heavy, still warm body in my arms, laying on the sidewalk at 11 at night on threshold of our closed vet's office petting his chocolaty velveteen ears, kissing the soft spots on his head and screaming from a place so deep inside me that I never even knew existed:
‘WHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????????????????????????????’
“WHY THIS DOG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????????????????????????????????!’
‘HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME????????????????????????????????????’
‘HE WAS THE ONLY ONE THAT LOVED ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cars that passed by pulled over and asked if there was anything they could do. Upon seeing the devastating mess on my face, they drove away. There was nothing anyone could do.

My other two dogs were good dogs but Guthrie was the true love in my life and he was my dog. He slept with me on the couch every night and always knew when I needed love and attention. He was my protector and my forever friend.
I must have laid there holding him for an hour as his body stiffened and grew cold. Crying so violently that I was throwing up, trying to gasp for air and chocking on the tears and vomit, as my husband stood over me speechless.
He picked Guthrie up and placed in him the back of my car and we drove home. The excruciating sound of his nose hairs whistling as he drove made me want to fling the car door open and splatter myself on the pavement. I kept my two fingers on the door latch as I looked out into the blackness seeing my reflection play like a movie in the frames of telephone poles flying past in the window. I picked his favorite spot in the front yard where he laid every day and my husband carried him over and laid him down next to the grave he was about to dig. I laid there on the snow holding him, now crying silent tears, my voice long gone, with my other two dogs sitting next to me sniffing at him. We lowered him in the deep grave and part of me crawled in too. In the top layer of soil, I scattered a bag of daffodil bulbs that were a present and hoped they’d bloom in the spring. I went and got my guitar and had my husband play Black Bird, the song we also played after we buried our other two old dogs, Tupelo and Aiko, after putting them down in a wild rose patch at the ranch. It was also the song we had played during our wedding ceremony in the tall uncut hay field over looking the snowy continental divide 8 years before.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to arise,
you were only waiting for this moment to arise,
and you were only waiting for this moment to arise


In my ‘Going to the Summit of Everest’ Mountain Hardware down parka, I laid on the grave all night until the sun started coming up, then I walked in to the house and crawled into my forty below sleeping bag on the couch.
That night was the beginning of the end. We never bounced back.

I went and parked at the Hot Springs just a couple blocks from the house we called home for just two years. I paid the non-local rate and went and soaked in the hottest pool on top of the sage dotted hillside that over looked my old neighborhood. A pool my husband never really liked because it was too hot. I closed my eyes and started saying all the things I never have. I called out to my house and told her how sorry I was for giving her all my love then leaving her for dead.

I pulled back the screen door, put my key in the lock and turned the knob. It smelled like I had just Spic and Spanned the floors. I stepped on the vintage red rag rug and hung up my coat on the hook underneath the shelf that held Jami and Jeff labeled galvanized steel tubs for our hats, gloves and scarves. I was there on purpose. It was important to me to go over every detail and acknowledge every part of the house. I held on to the waxy wide barn wood mercantile table there in the laundry room as I slipped my snowy boots off. I looked over at the high backed old laundry sink I found at a salvage yard and saw the rusty paint can stains I could never scrub out. Above I looked at the chalkboard and the song lyrics I wrote in happier times:

if this old house could talk
'What a story it would tell
We built this home together
And with love we drove each nail
Take me in your arms and hold me
'Cause we've been apart too long
Why if this old house could talk
All it would say is welcome home'
Loretta Lynn

I walked on the speckled black and white tiles my husband laid down when we first moved in. I remembered when the first crack came. I looked at the hundreds of postcards and photos thumbtacked on the valentine painted red walls, behind open shelves lined in aqua oil cloth that held my mass collection of rainbow colored Vintage Fiesta Ware dishes and Ball jars of every size. In the big bay window was that 1940’s old Tappan stove we found in perfect condition on the side of the road down in Montrose, Colorado on our way to go skiing at Silverton Mountain, that now held my baking pans and was overflowing with bright read tea roses and pink geraniums thriving in the sunshine. I sat down at my old 50’s era diner table with my scalloped edged embroidered teal table cloth and felt the embrace of the room I spent so many days creating and planning. It was so vivid in my mind. I unlocked the chicken wire swinging saloon doors that we had to build to keep Gibson, Jesse, Daisey Jane and Charley Buckets-the two 140-pound brother and sister 4-year-old Bloodhounds we adopted three days after Guthrie was killed. My husband said he would have bought me an elephant if it would have made me feel better. I think Guthrie’s heart was reincarnated in those two hound dogs. They never left my side. I had to give them back to the shelter the following Friday after the Monday that I left everything. I was absolutely numb. That’s another story for another day. I walked up the 2 stairs into my music room and looked at the custom made shelves we built to hold our thousands of CDs, Albums and Cassette tapes. I remembered laying on the chase lounge with my 2 100 pound Labs sleeping right on top of me and my husband taking my snap shot while a pot of Chicken Noodle Soup had been simmering all day on the stove an had steamed the windows. I noticed the vintage Country Song Round Up magazine on the table there- Hank Williams on the cover. I dropped the needle on The Joni Mitchell Miles of Aisles album still on the turntable and felt the crackling of the vinyl warm the room from all the speakers. I stopped and looked at my collection of concert photos all in matching black frames that I took on solo trips to festivals all around the country: Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Emmy Lou Harris and Neko Case that sat on the shelf behind the big red L shaped, down stuffed couch we bought with the little inheritance I got from my Great Grandma when she died. In the butter cream bathroom, fluffy, pale yellow towels hung from the walls. A huge industrial wire shelving rack stored vintage mason jars full of cotton balls and Q-tips with red gingham lids, old glass milk bottles full of bath salts and beaten up old flowery bread boxes that hid away medicine cabinet necessities. After living for eight years without running water in an old log cabin with just a woodstove for heat on 360 acres before we bought this house, this bathroom was my salvation. I looked out on to the front porch through the large window and saw my giant hanging flower baskets I had made that were dripping with lavender double wave petunias, soft green velvety lamb’s ears, salmon geraniums and dark purple sweet potato leaf vines. I could see Guthrie lying in the corner of the fenced yard in a freshly dug patch of dirt in the warm sunshine, smiling in the bright red and orange field of wildflower poppies I planted in the spring.

I walked up the narrow stair case to the landing and opened the wooden latch on the door of the nine foot pale green armoire I won at the Fraser Mercantile Auction that housed 15 years of Bon Appetite, Gourmet and Country Living magazines all in chronological order and old hat boxes filled with recipes. I looked in to our room with the afternoon sunlight shining in on that Ralph Lauren Derby Red VM 76 painted wall at the head of the bed, with the white and pink Ikea Rosalie fluffy down comforter that Guthrie was sleeping on. An over grown red garden geranium spread its wings in the southern sun facing window and everything was so alive. I remembered that was the last time I saw him. He was lying there sleeping in a ray of golden sunshine as I was leaving for work. I remembered thinking how beautiful and peaceful he was. I bent down and rubbed his warm, sleepy belly and kissed his wet brown nose and pink mouth as he took a long deep breath. He matched the room. He will forever live right there in my mind. My eyes teared up standing there in the door way glancing over at the 1940’s era pale blue strapless prom dress hanging on display in the opened framed closet from a thick silk padded hanger. There were leaves all over the hard wooded floor I had to pick up, I noticed, as Guthrie’s legs twitched while he dreamt of squirrels and barked in his teenage voice from behind a closed mouth.

I stopped at our closet room. A two level giant room with closets of it's own. I admired how all my clothes were arranged by item and color. The walls of shoes, cabinets of warm sweaters and my wedding dress wrapped in plastic hanging from a tall dowel. I remembered the late September day I wore that butter cream empire waist sheer dress with my lavender cashmere cardigan and walked down the old ranch road on a carpet of wet golden aspen leaves holding my soon to be husband’s hand with our old Black Lab, Tupelo, by our side wagging her tail and carrying a stick in her mouth.
I looked out from the row of windows on to our back yard and saw our big greenhouse we made out of salvaged honey colored wood windows. I saw my seventy heirloom organic tomato plants growing out of five gallon buckets and the out side gardens with perfectly plotted patchwork squares of every kind of rare lettuce and Asian green available.
I peaked down on to the back porch and saw Gibson laying in the sun next to pots of pastel water colored pansies and Jesse, rolling on her back in the rare thick high altitude green grass.

It all looked perfect. Maybe it was. I was the one who wasn't. I couldn’t keep up the charade. It was one Friday night my husband and I had the talk sitting at our old kitchen table and I said the words I never could before...
'The spark is gone and there's no getting it back.'
'Don’t you even wanna try?' He asked...
‘We have………………………………...’
He knew I was right. We didn’t raise our voices. We looked in each other’s teary eyes and as we sat in the erupting silence.
On the next Monday morning, I packed a few bags and left the house and everything in it. I gave it all away.
I left it all.

An old man walked up and joined me in the super hot pool and I was in no mood for company. So I got out quietly and went and soaked in the 'Back Yard' tub- a place my husband and I spent many cold, snowy nights, soaking and talking of our future. I wanted to go anywhere and everywhere and he was fine just living his dream right there in our little town, population 512. I closed my eyes in the cloudy blue water and floated on my back like I always used to and called him to join me there. I could feel his hands on my lower back holding me up. In a quiet voice I told him that I still loved him unconditionally and always would even if he was now re- married to one of my oldest friends and not interested in having a friendship with me. I thanked him for loving me for all those years in the only ways he knew how. I apologized for not loving him enough though the tough times. I said his name over and over in my head and gave him all the love I ever had. Even though it didn't work out with us forever and our paths went two very separate ways, he is my only family. I still keep his name as my own. I am who I am today because of him. I don't have any regrets and I honestly wish him all the love and happiness I was never able to give. I let him get back to his life and I continued floating in the pool alone feeling absolutely empty and full of love all at once.

I got up slowly from the ‘Back Yard’ Pool and saw dizzy stars in my eyes and sat back down on the edge to ride it out. Blinking my eyes until the stars dissolved, I got up, slipped on my flip-flops, wrapped my towel around me and walked carefully back to the locker room on the salted icy walkway. I changed back into my clothes and felt like I had broken open, realizing the difference from breaking down. I walked back to my car with the windows now fogged up by my 2 sleeping dogs. I drove over the railroad tracks, stopped in the park to let them out and run around before the long ride back home to my cold garage room apartment. I turned to drive past our old house one last time. I slowed down looking though the open window and looked at the patch of snow where Guthrie was buried and remembered the yellow daffodils that would be blooming in just a few months. I turned back on to the snow packed highway and left it behind… again… having made right in my own way… even if nobody knew it… I knew it.

I thought of Richard and Charlotte, as I was driving home in the fuzzy, out of focus blizzard, sleeping in a bed that wasn’t theirs, on barrowed sheets, being sequestered for the next year while he was building their new house. I realized it was probably unlikely that I would ever celebrate a 40-year wedding anniversary like they had. I did make wishes for my self that one day I would have a little home of my own again and place to start over with copper cops hanging from a ceiling rack, a patch of soil to keep my hands dirty in, and a man that I could never live with out, who would never let me go.


Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong. . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be . . . where I'll be

Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head Ah ooh
~David Byrne 1983