Amazon Trail: Lesbian Nomad

By Lee Lynch

I've always heard that women are good at making a home. Of course, some women, like the whole femme world, are better at it than others, like the whole butch world. Certainly, I have seen gay male homes that could make the most domestic of femmes weep with envy.

It's also been a longstanding notion that Virgos, which I am, are house goddesses. We're supposed to love setting up households and keeping them all neat and tidy. Well this lesbian Virgo is not true to type. My homes look more like combination offices/libraries/animal rescue centers/thrift stores than any homemaker's dream. What no one ever told me was how many times I'd be making homes. It's apparently my karma to do it over and over, in my current life, until I get it right.

So here I go again, gathering boxes, jettisoning accumulated treasures-turned-detritus, and renting one of those lesbian wonder rigs called U-hauls. At first, packing up my books for the umpteenth time, I felt sad, sad, sad. Would I always be rootless? My sort-of-step-daughter said it might be my fate: the universe wants me to live in lots of places so I can tell readers about them. Well, if that's the case, why doesn't the silly universe enrich me and make it easy for me to move to my next assignment?

But no, if it's my karma, I need to earn my way out of this itinerant state. My poor sweetheart, one day she was living a nice, calm life, and then she went and got involved with me. She's on line or on the phone half her life right now, researching R.V. and truck rentals and gluing me back together after I run myself ragged packing, working, looking at houses and taking care of a nightmare of details. In fact, the first thing I did after learning how soon I'd be leaving was to run my little car into a ditch.

The good part of running into the ditch was providing entertainment for a tiny community through which I was driving. While I was trapped in my car every driver on this country road stopped to help. When three burly guys couldn't pop me out, I called AAA. After the motor club rep got every piece of information imaginable out of me, including my great-grandmother's father's middle name and other relevant facts, warned me what they won't cover, and determined that I needed no emergency vehicles, he alerted the sheriff's office, which was already dealing with another car that had fallen into a ditch. The sheriff contacted the local fire and rescue agency which, apparently having a slow day, sent out five flashing, wailing emergency trucks, including a big red fire truck and an ambulance.

The very nice guy who owned the driveway I had blocked told me this was the most exciting thing that had happened since he moved there a year earlier. He also kept repeating that I didn't need to go to a body shop, somebody could bend my fender back in with his knee. As soon as I was pulled out of the ditch he went right over and did just that, saving me at least $500. When I drove away, the little crowd of guys that had assembled smiled and gave me thumbs up.

Now my only problem is figuring out where I'm going and how to pack and make all the arrangements in a few weeks. That's three weeks minus a five-day trip to a writing event in California. Maybe AAA would send help.

Since Northwest real estate is still beyond my means, the plan is to combine forces with my sweetheart, who lives about as far from me as you can get in the U.S. without being offshore. Our first choice was for her to move to the Northwest as soon as she got a job. That's not likely to happen in the next three weeks.

So the menagerie and I are going her way. She's calling it a hiatus, a 2-year honeymoon for us, rather than the invasion of her neat, efficiently organized condo that it is. She plans to make it fun when she and her very own west coast woo-woo crunchy granola butchy girlfriend arrives in her quiet suburban neighborhood. Except for the barely significant fact that we'll be working to afford to move to a larger house, and eventually back to the west coast, we are going to treat this as a long vacation.

Except – today I went to get a haircut. The guy in the waiting area overheard me talking about moving out of state. "I'm moving out of my rental," he said and assured me the landlord accepted his menagerie. "It's meant to be!" cried the haircutter.

So again I don't have any idea where we'll end up. Wherever, we'll celebrate what we've got together by making a home. We can send down roots as deep as my ditch. I'll write my heart out about wherever we live and I'll never rent a U-Haul again.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .