Bare Roots, mlb manning

 

I dream of houses.

 

Every night I wander through the gray. My mind racing ahead, penciling in the hallways and rooms as I enter. When I’m awake, my memory is nearly flawless. When I am dreaming, I forget what I have laid down, and the floor plans shift and change like a funhouse. I lose things. I set a box on a table, and when I return, the room no longer exists. Nothing gets done, and we never have coffee.

I’m always moving in, but I never live anywhere. 

I’m a realtor’s daughter. My childhood daydreams were built around creating my life inside other people’s houses. People I would never meet.

Picking out rooms I would never sleep in.

Houses I would never live in.

A life I would never know.

As I fall asleep, I try to choose my houses. I plot a new life like a child sets up a dollhouse. Adding new pieces while desperately trying not to knock down what is already standing.

We live in the tiny cottage I rented with my son and his family a few years ago in Seward, Alaska. The one with the perfect galley kitchen and a sleeping loft. I work in a health clinic that may or may not be real. I build a dog run under the giant trees. We walk the muddy paths to the harbor in the rain, and I buy snow tires for my car. 

When my anxiety about the stability of the rough road that snakes between the rocky shoreline and the mountain changes my mind, we live in a mother-in-law apartment over a garage that I 'build' on my son’s property in Wasilla.

But I worry about invading his family and the wooden stairs we have to climb with groceries, the cost of airfare, long winters, and where I can run.

When Alaska feels too claustrophobic, we move to the little blue house near the coast in North Carolina, a corner lot with a carport.

When Michael and I went to see it, I walked around it like it was the city of Jericho. We decided against it because it sits low in a floodplain. So, I never saw inside, but now we live there. I work at the hospital eight blocks over. I come home for lunch to let the dog out. I eat soup at a small round table in the kitchen. On weekends, I run down to the riverfront hours before the coffee-carrying tourists are awake.

Sometimes I decide we should stay in the yellow Rosemary House. We create a studio apartment out of the two rooms Betty Smith used when she was dying and rent the rest of the house out. We pretend not to hear the renters as they live on the other side of the wall. I read library books on the stoop. And when it rains, we watch black-and-white movies in bed.

But when I fall asleep, the houses and the lives I’ve chosen disappear.

And I start over.

Always moving, never finding a home.

Photographs: Manning, mlb, Houses Aren't Haunted; People Are, Bannock, Montana, 2021.