A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: First Person

My Tent
by Dana Luther
March 21, 2007

People ask where I'm from. I never know how to answer. Is home here? Where I lived last? Where I grew up? Where I wish I were? Home hasn't been a place for a long time; it's as mobile as myself. Home might even be going on separately from me right now, nevertheless still being mine.

When I was a child, I found my great-grandma's old dusty Indian blankets in the garage. They smelled heavenly, of earth and years and wet sheep. I used to take patio chairs and arrange a frame on the back lawn, then drape a blanket over that. I had a big crate full of weird rocks that my grandfather had collected from travels all over the country. Grandpa was a Montanan out of whom no one had been able to take the canyons, though they'd taken him out of them, transplanting him to the Southern California coast. The rocks were all at least half the size of a brick, and each one differed drastically from the others. One was clear and quartzy, another opaque and red as tomato soup. Grandpa told me that another, a big white one, was moonstone. (I misinterpreted this as "moon rock," but of course he'd collected the whole boxful decades before the moon walks.) My very favorite was a huge chunk of shiny obsidian like a shard broken from a giant's black bottle. It was cold, smooth, reflective and heavy, like nothing I'd ever seen except maybe the ocean at night.

After I built my tent I would take the rock box in with me and ritually arrange certain favorite rocks inside for magical decoration. I'd put rocks on the blanket corners to keep the blanket from flying away. The rocks had come from far-off places to fashion my impromptu home: a cave, a canyon, a mesa, a volcano, even the moon. Everyplace was with me, and I could be anywhere. From inside the tent I could see and feel the faraway sun through colored woof and warp, and smell everywhere the blanket had been.

The box of rocks must have been thrown away when some grownup cleaned out the garage. The Indian blankets went into the trash or got carted to the Goodwill. Maybe the rocks somehow wound up, accidentally, where they originally came from. I didn't. A while ago I moved away from a red-rock state where Indian blankets are auctioned. Today I don't have the rocks, blankets, Grandpa or patio chairs, but I'm home for now.

About the author:
Relocating every six months to a year hasn't been very career-conducive, but I have eked it out pretty well as a technical writer and editor, web designer, and corporate documentation manager. Currently I'm a stay-at-home mom who edits academics' writing and who further develops two above-average children.