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I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘home’ for a while now.  What is it that give our spaces that feeling that makes us feel good being there.  It isn’t uncommon for an apartment to feel distinctly not homey, particularly ones first apartment after leaving the house where parents and siblings still reside.  It makes tempting the idea that it is the people that make for a feeling of ‘home.’  But it seems equally common for an apartment to feel like the place where that person will spend the rest of their life.  And that happens to folks who live alone.  So, is it the people at all?

I love being with my family.  There was always something about returning for a visit to my childhood home that had a fantastic mix of nostalgia, comfort, and distance.  In 2005, I moved far enough away that visiting required planning and money; my visits to my hometown were reduced to about once every two years.  By my first visit, my parents had sold my childhood home and moved to the country into a brand new manufactured home while they planned out their dream home.  There was no way, I thought, to feel at home in a mobile home sat in the trees just outside of town.

I was wrong.  While it wasn’t the same, the feeling was.  I was in a house that had only even existed for about a year, but it was filled with familiar furniture and my parents.  For me, that ruled out the structure and the location.  What seemed to be at play was the combination of the people, the memories I carried with me, and the stuff in the house.  Had my parents simultaneously discovered their mutual love for Victorian furnishings, throwing out the carefully cultivated collection of things in the house, I think the space would have felt as cold as I expected it to.  These objects brought with them the stories that define us as a family.

“I always want objects in my home that have a connection to me or something I’ve loved.  It’s still stuff, but it’s stuff that has meaning.” Nate Berkus makes a great point, and one I’d like to explore in depth for myself.  When I had one of those cold apartments, just out of high school, it was filled with items I can barely remember, mass produced and cheap things.  The only items I even clearly recall are items that had a story, even if the item wasn’t old.  The dresser my dad painted for me for my new place, the sofa he reupholstered, and that is about it.  It would take me years to collect items of meaning, to be given things once belonging to grandparents and parents, and to have the maturity to honor those things and treat them with the respect they had earned.

Six months ago, I moved into the mobile home where my parents spent years hoping to build their dream home.  They settled into their new house over the summer, leaving vacant a space that had surprised me, on a land that is peaceful and beautiful.  I’m honored to live here in this space that has become a part of the story, where my nephews spent so much of their childhood, where birthdays were celebrated, where holidays with family were enjoyed, and where my parents lived and loved and convalesced.

Many of the stories are lost; it had been incumbent on me to ask the necessary questions and carry on the mythologies and lessons of my family, but I have failed to do so.  But I’d still like to explore what meanings these artifacts have for my life, for the lives of my family members, to recall the world in which they came to us and present them to the world.Continue Reading

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Dale

I sought the council of trees, Dale’s name lingering in my head,
hoping to glean wisdom from the aged assembly,
hoping to hear God through the woody branches.
I studied the structure of oak leaves, how each attached to a branch;
watched sunlight fall through the new growth on cedars;
made note of the greenbriar’s leafy fingers wrapping around the trunks of pecans.
The world was still and hot and dotted with tiny white butterflies
emerging from the thickets to enjoy a field of nectar-filled flowers in the afternoon sun.
My mind had been typically cluttered, with family dramas,
thirteen years of grief, first loves, comedy routines,
and parts of a jingle from a TV commercial I remembered from childhood.
Sitting in the surrounding quiet, I waited for the ancient botanical knowledge,
letting those thoughts drop away, heavy and viscous,
and leaving behind a calm in which I could almost hear the butterflies landing on petals.
The wind came gently then, in small bursts that the oaks seem to enjoy,
allowing the trees to flit thousands of leaves about merrily.
A rustle, a calm and relaxing rustle accompanied by silent mimics,
of a host of lesser plants vying for the favor of the post oaks,
standing as the monarchs of this dry woodland.
A slightly stronger breeze, a creaking sound as older specimens swayed,
some long dead, the bony outer branches moaning hauntingly in the current.
The tranquility was broken, butterflies scattered unceremoniously into the air,
having been blown off their perches by a strong wind that moved through the grasses,
flattening it in waves as it moved across the expanses.
When the wind reached the sentinels of trees standing bravely against it,
they found themselves unprepared and leaves and branches erupted into chaos.
Dale had died.
He had been my namesake, the hero and villain of his own stories,
his name lingered, attached to mine as a reminder of who he no longer was
and as a reminder of who he had been capable of being,
a reminder of who we all had been, of what we wanted to say we had been.
And now he was gone. As the gust moved on in the distance,
stillness returned to the trees and I still faced them, waiting for answers.
We were all there, waiting for different pieces, prostrating ourselves before them.
The instructions were lost, the knowledge never passed on,
the person whose position had been placed so highly seeming to fade
with great distances, separated by different trees, grasses, weeds.
His name lingered, attached to mine as a reminder that we should hold on,
hold him up as he fell, his wings revealed to be a mirage.
It was not always enough, we were not always enough,
and we allowed Dale to slip into humanness.
The trees had again become silent. The distances now as close as they would ever be,
as far somehow as they had felt before when inscribed books would
arrive by mail, wrapped in symbols of birthdays or holidays or plainly
when a book had piqued Dale’s desire to share it with me,
a boy he barely knew, but to whom his name was attached.
And there were songs and great conversations, which are things
of which plants know little. And things that had defined him
so importantly that it felt proper to discuss them now, with God or the trees.
The heat had started to intensify; beads of sweat formed on my neck and face.
Still I waited, knowing that lives had become altered, knowing that we had reached
both the beginning and the end of everything.
And I thought about whittled walking sticks, carefully crafted from the new growth.
His name lingered in my mind, attached to the trees, I now realized, a part of it.
The presence of butterflies had increased in my focused state;
they now seemed to be everywhere, clustered on flowers
and dancing through the space between the trees.
I turned and went back to the house, knowing and not knowing,
melding now with the air and grass, with the trees.
And I thought about Dale, his name lingering there, attached to mine,
attached to the moment and those memories,
attached to the wings of hundreds of tiny butterflies
And I smiled because I had known him.

Notes

Brian Fuchs, “Dale” from Okie Dokie (Scissortail Press, 2019)

Written 25 July 2015 in Payne County, Oklahoma.Continue Reading

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Quercus shumardii

for Papa

A great tree has uprooted,
exposing the branching mass
caked in the red soil of the Western Plains.
What was parched had been made rich and loamy
by the giants that fell before,
pioneering specimens that germinated and made
a home under the endless horizon of Oklahoma.
The water that made those plants flourish
had come from England and Ireland,
from Galilee and Missouri.
The roots of those ancestors fed the saplings
of the new generation.
Entwined, two young trees grew close together,
feeding on one another,
strengthening each other’s roots.
Acorns became a thicket and then a forest,
spreading out in all directions.
The flaming red soil has changed over time,
fertilized, nurtured, enriched.
The acorns have been found scattered,
rooting in Texas and Colorado,
in Alaska and Kentucky.
A tradition of strength and serenity
tested in new soils, clays and sands,
ultisols, entisols, crider and port silt loam.
Lightning took out the second tree,
ripped away what had been life,
forcing the survivor to stretch out new branches
to cover the fallen companion,
to show strength in the face of tragedy,
to learn to love when love seemed to disappear.
The branches, sprawling out massively,
became only sparsely covered with leaves, but
never lost their majesty, their humility, kindness, dignity.
Now the great tree has joined its long-fallen partner,
stretched at the base among those it had given life to,
cradled by the thick trunks of trees
that have become mighty themselves.
They stretch impressively toward Heaven,
mimicking the once proud figures
now so apparently absent in the canopy.
The sun can once again burst through,
but this is no longer the harsh and arid place
it was when ancestors first arrived.
In the clearing a small field of flowers
will spring up in memorial,
attracting the beauty of birds and insects
until new saplings join the congregation.
That great tree is now one of the ancestors,
enriching the soils for future generations.

6.7.2014

Notes

Brian Fuchs, “Quercus shumardii” from Okie Dokie (Scissortail Press, 2019)

Written 7 June 2014 in Glencoe, OklahomaContinue Reading

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Meeting Skylar & Wesleyan at the Grey Gardens Disco

Secrets feel more like friends than flesh,

written on the tightly rolled scrolls and tied loosely with a scrap of string.
These are the days when life is slipping past so quickly that I cannot seem to find a way back to it, a way to engage. I want to write my own secrets on tiny scrolls, but their contents would drive away even those I’m barely clinging to and they’d slip further into the torrent
away from me.

Time has been cruel, much more than I could have expected.

Mine will be the story that goes untold, unrecorded, unremembered.
Inaction fuels inaction and so I do not move, do not move, do not move. There are lives happening, I’ve been told, beyond the threshold I’m so afraid to cross. The moments I should’ve had hold me back, keep me wondering, force me into the safety of my empty bed
where the quiet loneliness can comfort me.

After the house has filled with leaves and dust and snow,

beyond the carefully orchestrated solitude, celebrations go on without me.
The most beautiful hear the music within themselves, gaily swinging auburn hair and laughing at their own unfunny puns. Merriment and giddiness come on like migraines and I find myself waving a flag and dancing joyously, still unable to coax myself from my home.
Happiness feels so foreign.

Ugliness greets me in every mirror, an old addictive friend

and the voids I’ve created have grown to feel comfortable on my miserable soul.
I’ve failed to learn the steps, and I am terrified that the dance will go on with out me. I look at the hollowness of the collected things around me, dismayed that I’ve become this me. This is the me that will keep happiness in its place
far away.

Nothing excuses knowing about leopard print,

a secret that seems to have allowed me to let go of ill-advised longings.
How incredibly sad it is to not find me so alluring that you can see past my plentiful flaws. I have known for quite some time that if I live my life alone, dying before I know love, that it is not me who is to blame, although I understand the temptation. It is others
who fail to see how happy I would make them.

Could these children have caused my empty world’s destruction?

set in motion events that will cause this tomb around me to collapse.
It’s too soon to know, but I welcome the crumbling. My stacks of nonsense are poised to fall into a blissful abyss. Oh, what exquisite joy I know I will feel when the rooms are all empty and there is just me to fill the space.
And someone to help me fill it, I hope.

Hope, indeed. It is all that keeps me from dropping into the crevasse myself,

cementing my loneliness forever with my inability to change.
I’ve begun to remember who I used to be and have found people who make me hate myself less and less every moment. But not even their patience can be endless, so if I am not to miss out on the Brian I’ve been trying to become again, I need to ask fast
and meet my friends for a drink.

Notes

Written 2 December 2012 in Anchorage, Alaska.

Brian Fuchs, “Meeting Skylar & Wesleyan at the Grey Gardens Disco” from Okie Dokie (Scissortail Press, 2019)

Formatting on WordPress ended up looking a little off, but this was as close as I could get it.  The first lines of the stanzas shouldn’t be separated, but indenting a line requires making a new paragraph.  If I figure out how to change that, I will.

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Novels

Another season of hastily written words has ended and life seems incapable of continuing on as it always had before
The children were overjoyed by accomplishment, reveled in it
a well-deserved pride
I sat, as always, stubbornly refusing to show my pleasure.
Alone.
Victories, celebrations, terribly parties planned so I could show my cowardice, spending ever-more time with only myself.
Alone.
My own failed excuses kept me from fully embracing sleep, tormented me through to the morning when I had become so exhausted with myself that I collapsed in to a chair where I remained until noon, warmed by a blanket of cats who seemed indifferent to my plight.
When the words have been published, I’ll think of Skylar’s smile and know how it is to be a writer. And I’ll buy copies of her book for my friends, hoping she’ll notice.

Notes

Written 1 December 2012 &  22 April 2013 in Anchorage, Alaska.

Brian Fuchs, “Novels” from Okie Dokie (Scissortail Press, 2020)

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I’ve been very into Art Journals lately. I’ve started several of my own, but have been most focused on my nature journal. There is always so much I want to capture about Alaska in the summer, but I let it slip past me and by January I wish I had recorded the greenness that I have started to miss. A trip to the zoo recently sparked this particular journal. It wasn’t so much the animals, but the beauty of the zoo itself. If you’ve been the Alaska Zoo, you will understand. Here are the pages I’ve completed so far. Feel free to comment and leave suggestions. I’m new to this and welcome criticism.