Homing In Passages

1. She sold real estate, and our family would help maintain the national average by moving every two or three years, but not very far. One time into the green-shuttered house next door on Orchard Street, then two blocks over to Keef Avenue. (51)
RESPONSE: This passage really grabbed my attention, because to me it means there was never a set "home" in the narrators life. Even though he states it was never very far it tells me there was never one set place during his childhood where memories were made and he grew up. I think this could have a big impact on his stability later in life.
2. Even my ex-wife, who wanted some honest distance between us, said, "Don't go out to the Midwest, don't go there." She said it was barren and flat and full of Bibles. (52)
3. But I'd already signed the contract to teach at a coed boarding school in Michigan, a place I'd been and didn't much want to be. (52)
4. "I arrived in heavy rain. No letup for three straight days, and I went stir crazy finally in the knotty-pine-walled cabin I'd rented from the school, classes still two weeks away. A ghost community." (53)
5. "But I believed in omens and signs, and when the sky cleared before the bottle emptied, I took a walk, which, on this campus, meant into the woods--1,800 acres between two lakes, Wahbekaness and Wahbekanetta: "water lingers, water lingers again."(53)
6. "At this moment in the moonlight I imagine that the trim on the trailer house is pink, and that the man is a decent man but a bad drinker--half an hour? All day? How about six months? Perhaps custody of his son depends on the man's sobriety, though who would drive out so late on a night like this to check?" (54)
7. "This is the north country. The bridge across the Mackinac Straits is the longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting the landmass of lower Michigan to the Upper Peninsula (referred to as the U.P.)" (55)
8. "It's already October, and for the past half hour the blue heron has kept his outpost at the first bend, knee-deep in shallows. But now he spreads his enormous wings and rises slow-motion, gliding downriver above the last of the cardinal flowers: blue heron, red cardinal flowers." (56)
9. "So let another winger come. Let it take us where it will." (60)