Home By Another Way

We pushed our way a little further on Sunday into the brush toward the back of the property.  It was a spontaneous expedition mounted primarily to get Tir a little exercise out of the house.  We navigated the paths to the southeast of the house, waving at the alpacas grazing across the way, and then headed north around and behind the garden site.  We spoke little, and that largely appreciative amazement that on Christmas Day the weather still permitted such excursions.  The sky was blue, the temperature brisk but mild for the season, and the wonder of the nativity still full within us.

The mowed path led us alongside the prairie grass dome, back to where the landscape begins to descend toward the spring.  Trees, and the underbrush that almost webs them together, here create a natural fence line that I have only breached once -- and Lori, never.

She pushed on, brushing back and breaking off intruding twigs and branches.  I picked my way more cautiously, reticent to snag the sweater I still wore from church that morning.  Curiosity finally blunted by the impeding thicket, even Lori finally turned back toward the way from which we'd come; I promising to gas up the power trimmer one of these days and clear some of this entanglement away.

The prairie grass having thinned for the winter, we, like the magi, returned home by a different way -- off the cleared path, through the field and along the western edge of the property.  Deer paths, we could discern, created a criss-crossing highway system of comings and goings, and we stumbled across more than a few deer-sized matted places where it has apparently been common for them to bed down for the night.

It was a bucolic stroll, welcomed and even cradled by habitable land seemingly content to make room for our new roots here.  I will, indeed, eventually get busy with that power trimmer, though I'll admit to some reticence.  It isn't so much laziness or my clumsiness at the intimidating device as it is a sense of humble deference and respect.  It feels presumptuous, after all, to scarcely get unpacked before whacking away at what we have found here, imposing my particular vision of how this place should be before we have listened and sought to understand its own.  Our own fingerprints will eventually be felt here -- we will participate in the shaping and the nurturing and, to be sure, the trimming -- but for awhile we will walk, trace, observe the movement of the winds and the patterns of the animals, the bending of the grasses, the sentry points of the evergreens, and the squirrels' disposition of the fallen nuts and hedge apples.

If ours is to be a relationship with this land of participation rather than imposition, we have much to hear,
           ...and see,
                     ...and touch,
                               ...and learn.