I grew up in a farmhouse that was built in 1720, and though I've lived for much of my adult life in other places there's something about that house and the land around it that still feels like home. Recently I was back for a visit, and when I stopped into the local supermarket, a wonderful man working in the produce department said, "Welcome home!" and something about the way he said it and the way I was feeling, it touched something so deeply in me that I knew that I was home.
There are so many hopes and dreams that were born in that house. It is the first place where I ever came home to, and the place where I began writing about, the place where I wandered the fields and learned about bugs and bees and flowers and trees. In the area in the back, that I called the back, back yard where I used to wander, there were so many magical things. White violets, moss, tiny lace wings with their iridescent colors, and these wonderful juniper bushes that I discovered I could crawl into and hide in the center, making a kind of fairy home where I felt protected and surrounded by the beautiful scented evergreen boughs.
The person who I was lives on in the person I am now, and on this visit I could feel so much that the land and house and barn are just waiting for me to begin restoring it to what it had been when I was growing up and even longer before that. It has been in kind of sleep, the way an enchanted forest is, but underneath the overgrown areas and near the plantings that have not been nurtured for too long there is life that is waiting to be breathed into and taken up and in with the breath of all that is a part of the journey that is and was and is to come.
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