Third home

 Third Home 

john clare 

it wasn't long after I was born 

that I came home from Bluefield

from the West Virginia snow storm

back to Vicco, Kentucky to live

but for a spell for daddy heard

the call to come to Sopchoppy

to preach the Methodist word

and so in the Packard we journeyed

making it around June of fifty-five

naturally I was only five months

from being a native Floridian

or a Kentuckian if just once

daddy would not have left mamma

to fend for herself sending

her to Granny Orander to have me

while he was busily preaching

a dubious duty to rely upon a

drunken brother to carry one

over icy roads in a hard labor

wondering if on Pinnacle Rock I'd come. 

So I came, and so we stayed

in Sopchoppy eight years until

the conference sent us packing

saying, come over to Monticello

and to that wonderful two story

Victorian parsonage with a view

of Washington street from my

upper left window where I would

sit and dream before bicycling to the

painting class where in oils I

learned there was more to life

than Sopchoppy and stick figures 

and so I lived for a year in my

third house, the only house with

an upper room, save the Asbury

year with ZT Johnson and

the Emory Gray over his 

garage apartment marriage

And so they tore down that third

home, for a parking lot and the first

just because, while the second

the fourth stood, the fifth moved,

the sixth moved, the seventh standing,

the eight remaining, the ninth and so the tenth too.

But of all the homes

 it is the third home that I miss the most.

And I do know that every boy

should have a two story Victorian

with a view of Washington Street 

at least once in his life time.