HOME AGAIN...  It’s true that some things don’t make sense... no matter how hard we try to find meaning in them.  I got all the way home today without taking a single picture, which, given my photo du jour  habit that borders on compulsion, doesn’t usually happen... doesn’t make sense.  We started the drive home at eight o’clock this morning in Woodland, just north and west of Sacramento.  Eight hours later we pulled into our garage.  A perfect end to a perfect trip... except for my having neglected today to stop along I-5 to snap the picture that I had intended to get of the dry gullies and hills north of Kettleman City.  I settled for something more familiar... at home.  We have a bookcase where, along with books, we keep what some people would call “souvenirs” from a lifetime of journeys.  They are more than nick-nacks, much more important than souvenirs, though I guess that’s what they are.  They are reminders...  

For today’s picture I decided to get something from home, so I took aim at a ceramic horse that became part of our household when we lived in Singapore and later came to live with us in The States.  It actually has little value.  It’s not from the Tang Dynasty, or the Ming or even the Ching Dynasty which extends all the way up to 1911. I remember buying it but don’t remember the year (sometime between 1969 and 1974) and bringing it into the house on Greenmead Avenue just off Bukit Timah Road in Singapore.  The little horse traveled to Washington, D.C., then to Upstate New York, and finally to San Diego.  It occupies a place on a shelf with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh; “Paradise” and “Purgatory” from Dante’s The Diving Comedy; and four volumes of Shelley’s Poetical Works; the two volume set of Le Morte D’Arthur, By Thomas Malory; and Victor Huro’s Les Miserables, Volume 2 (the one that begins with Book VIII “The Noxious Poor.”).  I don’t know what happened to Volume 1.  Perhaps I lent that book to somebody long ago, and maybe it’s out there somewhere on somebody else’s bookshelf. On the shelf there’s also a lapis lazuli egg from China.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this writing, some things don’t make sense. But the things in this picture are familiar and make me feel I’ve arrived at home when I get there.