At Home With... Lori Sambol Brody

We spend some time with contributor and writer Lori Sambol Brody to find out what home means to her...

--

Where is home for you?

Home is coyotes playing in our backyard, the chorus of frogs from the creek, the piercing call of the red-tailed hawk. Home is our little house, which used to be the meat locker of a hunting retreat. Home is my grandmother’s oak desk, my notebook with genealogy research, my grandfather’s Cross pens. Home is the sand dollars I brought home from a Nicaraguan beach, the striped blankets my husband always buys at the San Ysidro border crossing. Home is a yahrzeit candle burning for my mother. Home is my husband listening to the Dodgers on his staticky transistor radio, my daughters’ voices like little birds downstairs in their rooms, the family dancing in the living room to a replay of our wedding mixtape. Home is evacuating the house because of a wildfire and knowing that only what is in the car is what is home.

If you could choose to live anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Right where I am, but magically with far less traffic and colder summers.

What song(s) remind you of home?

Any song about L.A. – X’s 'Los Angeles,' Chili Pepper’s 'Under the Bridge,' Tom Petty’s 'Free Falling.' Freakwater’s album Feels Like the Third Time, especially 'Crazy Man,' always brings me back my oldest daughter’s infancy, trying to rock her to sleep.

What makes you homesick?

The scent of white sage, the howling of coyotes, my daughters’ faces on the screen of my phone, sticking their tongues out.

--

Read Lori's flash 'Undark' in our BODY&SEX issue and submit to our HOME issue here.