Locks, Home and the Return

by mariebarry

We wander down the narrow streets in a Balkan border city, shuffling through forgotten histories down the lanes of locked memories. We pass burned buildings among new development, old houses sitting on faultlines nearly sideways from some surprise of an earthquake with lace curtains in the windows. İ see the shadow of a woman dressed in a high-necked gown in the window and wonder if she is there. Borders are like faultlines.

A rainbow of light comes through the broken windows around the green door. An inner foyer reveals a second entranceway wih squares of colored glass, blue, green, red, yellow. A cat is waiting on the porch. The door is locked. The door is not simply locked by the familiar key misplaced on the table, hidden at the bottom of the pocket. The door is locked by a key that is never lost.

A man rides by on his bicycle not knowing that the rainbow of colored light and the cat on the porch is what has attracted my gaze. The cat seems to be waiting for someone to return. İ am standing in contemplation of how the colored glass must look from the inside. What it must be like to have such a rainbow of colored glass in the foyer. When she wakes, morning light is bringing a shifting symphony of light to the breakfast table. The surface of the water pitcher sparkles in infinite reflection of color and light. The man riding by on his bicycle tells me the house probably belongs to a Greek family who left during a period of unrest. The earth quakes at the borderline.

İ remember the man named İsa who sold me a golden locket in America. He had been there for twenty years; İ do not know what keys he holds. He told me of these locked homes. İ see the door is closed with a chain and a thick padlock, just as he had described. The owners of the houses, he told me, leave the houses locked in hopes of returning someday. They keep the key safe and wait for the day when they will again return, unlock the door, and move into the shifting rainbow of light that is home. As they wait, the key never rusts. The home falls to ruins, the colored glass, the rainbow of light shifting crumbles to the floor, through the broken floorboards, down to the quaking earth. But the key is never lost.

İ wonder at what things we leave locked in the homeland, holding tightly to a precious key. Our memories. Our homes. Our selves.

İ think of the buried treasures of the Appalachians and the secrets we hold. With no trust in banks in my mountain homeland, they bury their treasues in jars in the expansive backyard leading into wilderness. How many treasures, pennies carefully saved, must live locked in their secret places underground at the borderline of home and the world. How many secrets live locked deep within, within the safe soil of home.

We lose our memories, our minds. We lose heart. We forget what the keys we hold unlock as our minds unravel toward the infinite. We pass from this place in what feels barely more than a day, a moment in which we are turning our eyes from the grass toward the bright light of the sun, and find it is too bright to see. Our memories are the spots that remain as we move our eyes back toward the earth, see the black spots flashing like the core of the sun, like a distant understanding of what we just turned our face toward. Then they fade as we pass on. And all we locked, all we buried, remains secret in the depths of home.

For a moment my thoughts rest on the woman with her colored glass and her golden key.