Home
On August 21, 2022 we left our city home, we picnicked with good wine in our empty living room while the sun shone its last light on us in that place. We remembered a really good life together. We came to this home when she was just a little girl; no front teeth. We left all adults, walking away into a new life together and apart. After our picnic we laughed and cried a lot and then we locked the door and drove away. We traveled a very familiar highway, watching the sunflowers waving in the wind and the yellow canola winking at us; we traveled to the place that is already home, but now it has asked us for whole hearts and we have willingly conceded.
This place has known us longer than any other place in which we have dwelt. This place knows generations, my grandmother taught me land love here when I had no front teeth. In the lake we love, just down the road from here, we baptized the little girl’s feet, when she was three weeks old. This place has known us in our vicissitudes, in our youthful new love, in our long absences and travels across the world, in our constant running back and forth from city to country, in our busyness and laziness, in sickness and in health. And it doesn’t know just us, it knows my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters with all their children, and so many friends made this place home for moments they hold dear. We have to make newness and particularity within a place that is used to being held in common; lively memory ghosts fill the rooms. I am grateful that most of the ghosts are friendly enough and we are weaving them into the blanket of being which we will keep as we discover the place afresh in the growing stability of daily life.
But I have never been so fully home. Beyond the memories I think it is the fact that the walls are so permeable. In the city, we needed a home to be enclosed, safe from the too muchness. Here the dwelling opens into an expansive holding, we are looped about by loving trees, beyond them is the lake to hem us in and melt the horizon, the forest to enfold us and send up our eyes to the blue sky and the falling light. When the inner lights are extinguished here the world opens, the sweet moon and the ever expansive stars wrap us in their covering. All of it is home, ours to indwell, to tend and keep and to be kept by. It isn’t yet fully known, the snow and the wind, the storms, the lonely quiet, the long achingly slow spring, the years of sameness which we cannot anticipate will stretch love, but what love isn’t stretched; what home does not hold sorrow within its warm joy.
