Duende

Last night we built what will likely be our last campfire on this land. I released some homebrews from their cages, and the Missus & I put the baby in a tent a few feet from the fire. We talked well into the night while Eleanor slept the deep neolithic hominid sleep.

I would rather walk across hot coals than move from one house to another. All that packing, hauling, unpacking, and arranging...it works my nerves, gives me The Headache. If a rich, eccentric billionaire Texan showed up on my doorstep and was like, "Boy, I'll pay to have a crew come in and move everything from this house to the next house without you so much as lifting your pinkie finger," I'd be all "Yeah, but what's the catch?" And if he said, "I wanna see you walk across hot coals." I'd say, "Bet," and be all up in them there coals.

No Texan is to be found, though. And so it goes. It one week, we're moving from our beloved little domicile to a strange house up the road, on five acres, in wide open pasture lands and corn crops flanked with loblillie pines.

This is a weird life. Last night I decided, "By God, I'm taking this fire ring with me. I'm hauling every last rock of this ring of stone to our new place." My idea was that since Eleanor was born in a rented house, she won't ever be able to really return to her place of birth. But if we keep the rocks from the fire pit, she'd at least be able to sit by a fire from time to time and know that those rocks came from the same land that she was born on. In the postmodern End Times, a ring of rocks has to substitute for the Motherland.

Forget the pain in the arse that is relocation. I'd walk across hot coals if it would ensure Eleanor a healthy sense of familial/ethnic identity and/or cultural tap root in all this chaos of commercialism and pop identity advertising.