I will not give up on you

Clippings from the lettuce (and radish!!) as apertif

This weekend, at the tractor pull, I met a new Aroostookrat—a disc-golf enthusiast who lived for a year on Cape Cod. We talked about belonging, how I'll never belong in a place as thoroughly as he does in the County.

He said, “Yeah. But there's all kinds of belonging."

And it's so true, how he can belong here and not, not the way his brother or his cousin do, his brother who runs the grader at the pull and his cousin the heavy-equipment mechanic for John Deere.

So. To belong and not to belong. How everything I do is an action towards home, when home is nothing but belonging.

I'm reminded of Animal Dreams. Two sisters: both sojourners—but one carries home with her wherever she goes, and the other constantly hungers, yearns after it, and never finds it. I want home.

Or some other of the characters from “Boogie Nights,” Don Cheadle and Melora Walters, who fall in love: one's black, one's white. Maybe that doesn't matter, or shouldn't matter, but is it wrong to love the experiment Anderson performs with the concept of race, by pairing those two up, without ever mentioning race, or interracial romance, or miscegenation, or the horror of the fight for civil rights, or any of the other Faulkner-esque topics perhaps only fraught with significance for those who spent formative years in the American south?

It's beautiful, almost a party trick, the way their bodies crowd together in every shot, the contrast in their pigment merely a thing of aesthetic beauty.

A digression. But maybe not. Because they, too, find home with each other. They belong nestled together, on the screen and in our consciousness, finding happiness in a mirror image, like a photo's negative.