A landline phone is ringing. I’m not sure whether it’s coming from inside the house or from someone else’s. Everyone’s windows are open on this narrow street, where rows of 1940s single family homes sit close to one another. It’s apparently one of the first sunny mornings in days (weeks?). Pittsburgh weather is notoriously gloomy. I woke up to the sounds of people walking down the street talking and car radios passing by, a few birds, trains. Later, I heard a woman who sounded like she was praying (preaching?) from somewhere in the neighborhood.
There are churches everywhere.
Something comes alive in me every time I visit this city. I was born here, lived the first 12 years of my life here, and I believe it’s imprinted on my psyche, these hilly, cobblestone roads and bridges and weedy lots and old mills and factories—all of it, as if it were the setting of some old dream I had years ago that still lives inside me somewhere.
I thought it appropriate to start my road life here, at my roots. My family immigrated to the Pittsburgh area from Italy and Sicily three generations ago, and it will always feel like home to me.
I’ve technically been living on the road for two weeks but mostly just circling the Baltimore area, wrapping up interviews and some other work before heading farther out. I don’t think it’s occurred to people—even those closest to me—that my life on the road has already begun. I’m already used to living out of bags. I’ve adjusted. I’d forgotten how that feels—setting up somewhere for a few days, finding your nook, a place to sleep well and a space where you can work, only to have to pack it all again and move on to the next and recreate your nook all over. That’s part of the allure of nomadic living: defining spaces—claiming them, creating them—as we go. It’s also part of the hassle, like when your tent is blowing away, tumbling through the yard, as you’re on your way to an interview that you’re already late for, and then it starts raining.
Sometimes it feels like everything I do is in preparation for what I really want to do—which is to provide myself with the time and space to create. That’s all I want to do here. As a kid, that’s all I did. I made things. I made little books and bound them together with that thick, white paste they give to elementary school kids. I spent a lot of time in the woods, too, collecting rocks and making trails and writing poems and songs. Eliminate the demands put on us to make a living and sustain ourselves somehow in this world, and I guess not much has changed.