Hope springs eternal?

  Well, maybe.

  On the phone with mom the other day, she asks if I'll be coming home for Christmas, like I have the past 4 years. Wait, what?

  Turns out no one wants to buy our house. This is not terribly surprising: it's a working-class neighborhood, tons of other houses are for sale, and if you hang out in the nearby park for long enough, you will be offered drugs. Still, some people had come to check it out, but no offers or real interest.

  So maybe the crisis is averted for a little while, anyway. And maybe I can go home again and even stay a bit, depending on whether I get into grad school for the fall or just give up forever and resign myself to a lifetime of awkwardly chatting up old teachers while I make them smoothies at the YMCA.

  I recently wrote a post about the idea of home that prompted me to really think about the subject. What does being home really mean? What's so important about having a place you call home? To me, home feels like a static concept, a snapshot of a time and atmosphere that may never really have existed, that you carry with you to each new place and point in your life. Something you can hold up and say, "This is what it used to be like. This is where I'm from. This is what I go back to."

  But it's not really like that, is it? Your home is not a novel where the story stays the same through repeated readings and you can just pick up where you last left off. But it's hard not to think of it like that, and feel the difference when you do go back. When I think of my home, it's one with a steady job, two dogs, and furniture in the living room. But that's not true anymore. How long does it take to readjust, to feel normal in a place that doesn't feel quite like home?

  I'd kinda like to be able to find out.

  I could be the next Steve Jobs! Wait, nope... don't have hardwood floors.

Falls Church City Decimation

  How do you know when you've followed a band (okay, maybe just one person) around long enough?

  When they a) call you by name from the stage, b) afterwards say how excited they were to see you there, and c) refuse to let you pay for their new cd.

  They did not, however, offer to clean my bathroom. Even though I undressed and brushed my hair out over a towel on the floor, it's still absolutely covered in glitter.

Fright Comes to the Cumberlands (Pt. 2)

  When we left off, I had just discovered that the unwelcome bedroom visitor was a squirrel, not a mouse. Okay, the one in my brother's room actually was a mouse, but the squirrel is the topic of this horror story.

  So, to re-set the scene: Dad's in the basement, I'm on the couch, squirrel's on the wall.

  I'm watching this little varmint crawl all over our graduation pictures when Dad reemerges from his lair. To my credit, I didn't start yelling about the squirrel or cause any fuss; rather, I merely pointed, mutely, Chaplin-like, at the wall.

  My dad is like me in that, when riled, his real origins become apparent.

  "Shoot! Dagnabbit! It's a squirrel! Dang it!"

  A series of similar hillbilly curses follow. I haven't seen him this upset since he dropped my camera on the concrete after a Coldplay concert. But then:

  "He's come back to avenge his brother!"

 *needle scratch* Um, what?

  This requires some backstory. Anyone who talks to my dad for more than a half hour will hear at least one of two stories: the one about the old guy at the bottom of the mountain who runs a vegetable stand in his front yard and calls slugs "shrugs" OR, the story of the zombie squirrel.

  A couple years ago, our house was the target of serial rodent home invasions. My dad finally identified the culprit: a flying squirrel. I thought, as undoubtedly many of you did, that these things were not native to our parts or that they all existed under the watchful eye of Jack Hanna; but, as it turns out, there are tons of them lurking in the woods, just waiting to give us typhus.

  My dad ferreted out the intruder and repeatedly removed him from the house. But he kept coming back. Long gruesome story short, Dad was forced to dispatch him with a shovel and buried him in the woods out back. This bought him a few peaceful nights. But not too long afterwards, the signs of the squirrel were heard again. The next morning, Dad went out to examine the grave site.

  It was dug up.

  If I had been there, I probably would have blamed the innumerable dogs or wild animals or possibly feral pigs that inhabit our neighborhood. But not my dad. Oh no. He insisted that the squirrel had come back to life, dug itself out, and once again taken up residence in our house, this time out of ghostly spite.

  The entire process had to be done over, only this time it was even more difficult on account of the squirrel being, you know, undead and all. Eventually it stayed dead -- maybe Dad got it with a toothpick stake through the heart, or shot it with one of those old quarters that actually contained real silver. I didn't really inquire about the details.

  After this ordeal, naturally Dad was very concerned that he might have another battle with supernatural rodents (or at least a relative of one) on his hands. Regardless, he took care of it with a broom and set traps all around the upstairs. But something tells me we haven't seen the last of the zombie squirrels...

Fright Comes to the Cumberlands (Pt. 1)

  I'm pretty proud of that pun.

  Back in D.C. after a serious curate's egg of a mini-vaca. The time I got to spend in TN was good, but the reason for said visit couldn't be forgotten. Well, let's talk about that later. Right now, a terrible story.

  So we stayed in Sewanee for a couple of days. The story behind this is too long to go into, but suffice it to say that we live there sometimes. And when we do, we live in the woods. Being a university town, our area is a bastion of liberalism and modernity surrounded by thick forest, small towns, and the cousins your mama warned you about. The region's most famous resident was this guy, which tells you more than I ever could.

  Anyway, after a busy Saturday escorting my grandma, the craft queen celebrity of a certain nameless town, around a crafts festival, we returned to Sewanee for the night. I drifted off into peaceful slumber in my old room, only to be awoken around 4 a.m. by the scritching and pattering of little mice feet. 

  I'm not too creeped out. I've heard mice at night before. It's a log house in the woods -- there's bound to be some kind of animals lurking around it. Plus, how do I know it's not coming from the roof? Annoying, but not something to get out of a warm bed at dawn for.

  I go back to sleep, only to be awoken a few minutes later by even louder scratching. Okay, this is a mite more disturbing. I turn over with a vague thought to investigate... and see a unusual dark spot on the wall. As I mentioned the house is made of wood, so weird patterns and dark spots are everywhere. However, I've been looking at this wall for ten years and I know this is out of place. I know it will be hard to believe to many people reading this, but I actually try to go back to sleep at this point. Not for too long, though; when I look again and the mysterious thing has changed position, I decide it's time to evacuate the premises.

  Bro's old room across the hall: I should be safe here, right? Ohhhhhh false. I slip into an uneasy slumber only to be awoken .5 seconds later to the sound of skittering feet on metal. What fresh hell is this? I look over to see the shadow of a mouse scurrying over the giant crosscut saw my bro has mounted on his wall. 

  You probably have a lot of questions here, none of which I'm qualified to answer.

  Well crap, what now? I'm fine with the idea of sharing a house with mice, but only if they stay in their lairs and out of my sight. I liked Willard, but I don't want to reenact it.

  I drag a pillow and blanket downstairs with me and set up camp on the couch. After a few minutes, stepmom comes in and asks what I'm doing.

  "Mice. Upstairs."

  Stepmom's eyebrows shoot up towards the hairline: she hates critters in the house. She hurries off to alert the authorities, aka my dad, who then descends to the basement and reemerges with a handful of mousetraps. He also brings up his faithful companion of many years, an electric mousetrap he reverently refers to as "Old Sparky".

  While he's down in the basement assembling his arsenal, I try to lay down but am disturbed once again by the sound of tiny claws on metal. I look over at the stairwell and vaguely register that the thing has indeed followed me downstairs. Not only that, but it's clambering all over the air grate and the pictures on the wall. These feats are made possible by the fact that this is no ordinary mouse. This...

   is a squirrel.