LXX. the wild wild west

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG2kL4ojylk : listen to Dolly croon as you read.

The Little Martian walks into an empty house. 

“It ain’t no home no more, ’tis just a house,” he sings, like a caricatured mammy from a bad Southern novel.

“What’s with the voice?”

“I don’t know. These country roads just bring out something in me,” he laments, looking out at the land with a wistful gaze.

“Dehradun is the capital of Uttarakhand. We aren’t exactly out in the Wild, Wild West, you know.”

“Everything is the Wild, Wild West if you come from far enough,” he replies, cryptically.

“It’s weird, no?” I continue, ignoring his theatrics. “To see a house once so full of sound and laughter and beautiful furniture stripped to its bare white chaddis.”

“But is it the chaddi that’s important, or the goods inside it?” replies the Martian.

I thwack him on the head and roll my eyes. The Martian is out of his mind today.

“Can you be serious for a second?”

“I am being serious. The house is just a shell , it’s the people, that is , the goods inside it, that make it valuable.”

“Are you calling my family home a chaddi?”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Not everything is supposed to be fun, LM… it’s okay to just be solemn sometimes, you know!”

“But whhhhhy?” he whines. “It’s not like it’s sad. You guys have had some jolly times in this house. Isn’t it just time to move the duck on now? Move on to finer pastures and create new memories in new white walls? Why hold onto the old shit?”

“Because there are no finer pastures when you’re leaving the lushest pastures of them all.”

“Bullshit,” he replies, blunt and bare.

“You don’t get it. You didn’t grow up here.”

“Are you telling me I don’t understand what it feels like to leave a place behind? To venture far from all I know and knew and ever thought I would know? Are you telling me I don’t know what it feels like to leave a place one once called home?”

I slacken. The Martian is playing the ‘I’m-from-Mars’ card again.

“That was voluntary, LM.”

“And this? You’re hardly being evicted, you doofus. You’re being propelled! Forward, forward and forwaaaaard! The world is waiting with open arms and a cup of free coffee for you!”

“Are we talking about the same world?”

“If not this one, then the planet yonder… have faith.”

I shrug, look out at the forest that I once called home, and really try to see it —the gossamer spiderwebs that dangle like finely spun silk between the fruit trees;the tall pine that we once called our very own Christmas tree;the little bottlebrushes brushing against the tips of finely cut grass and ...the sun! The sun that slants and lights and lets me see it all so very clearly.

I try to freeze the frame on my retinas , to capture it in light and sound and verse.

“Maybe a house is just a house after all,” I murmur.

The spider weaves through night and day, trying to web the trees into a roof, to create a home where a house once lay.