The Solitary Wanderer Comes Home
The following is a new chapter from a memoir in progress, which I aim to finish by the end of this year. The book is an attempt to explain my experience of fatherhood to myself. While I’ve polished the following essay to some extent, it remains very much a draft.
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The Solitary Wanderer Comes Home
I was three years old when my uncle held an old-time house raising. He had just bought an acreage a mile up the road from us. It was a beautiful homestead with a large alfalfa field and a skirt of timber on the north edge, where he planned to build. He poured the foundation and the basement slab, then invited us to the house raising once the concrete had cured. The men knocked out as much framing as they could in a day, the women tended a potluck spread, and the kids played back in the woods.
At some point I decided that I was done with it. I slipped through the crowd of grownups tugging on pant legs and dresses, saying that I wanted to go home. I knew the way: there was just one road at the end of the long gravel drive. After enough adults had ignored my pleas, I decided I’d just have to walk.