To Be Here, Home

The darkness dissipates as it does every morning, gradually, glacially, as the sun inched northward, relinquishing someone else's day in pursuit of our own. As I say, it is hardly novel; indeed, this quotidian movement is so ordinary as to routinely go unnoticed.

But not this morning. I sit out on the deck and allow it to unfold me as well as the morning. Yes, the sky - only moments ago full of stars - is clear and permits the emerging glow it's full and unobstructed stage. Yes, the air is crisp, befitting a new autumn day. But singular beauty is not what simultaneously settles and evokes me this emerging dawn. It is simply that I haven't seen it envelop this particular landscape in quite awhile - first, the silhouette of the trees, and then the rounded shape of the chicken coops; the outlines of the leaves in the nearby trees, and eventually the hints, the teasing foretastes, of autumn's golds and reds and yellow and bronze. The morning of a new day. The dawning of a new season. Now the rooster officially announces the fact.

We've been traveling.

First, there was grief work to attend. Emotions, consolations, ruminations, details; simultaneously carrying and being held. Physically we were elsewhere - emotionally, relationally, psychologically, too.

Home, then, for a rapid-fire turnaround during which we scarcely looked around before flying off again.

The hours and the stories and the laughter and the tears, the tasks and the memories and the new experiences forged, first, days and then weeks until finally, long after darkness had settled upon our traveling stamina and Taproot Garden, we arrived home last night. Our travels have been rich. Glorious, even. The distance and the privacy came at a good time. The celebrations we indulged, the landscapes on which we became drunk, the time together to both remember and dream. To simply "be".

I listen now to the stirring chickens, already clamoring for release. I survey the garden from the deck's distance, wondering what gifts might still be on offer after such neglect. Mostly I simply receive the familiar and now beloved landscape, night's curtain raised, accept the sudden lump in my throat, and whisper a prayerful gratitude for being here.

Here.

As the poem of this day begins, I recall the observation with which Wendell Berry closes one of his own:

"What we need is here."

Here.

It's good to be home.

Together, The Persons We’ve Become

 

The table is laden with leftover bottles of water, cans of tea, chips, nuts and plates.  The chairs and tables have been folded and returned to the barn.  The microphone cables have been coiled and the sound system ensconced again in its corner of the basement.  The farmstead has quieted again to the usual crowing of the rooster and squawks of the hens and occasional grunts of the alpacas next door, and our routine shufflings here and there.  

And the enduring whispers of memory.

 

On Friday evening, as this holiday weekend commenced, we hosted the opening gathering of Lori’s high school reunion.  Memorabilia hung from tree branches, and animated tables.  Music from the ‘70’s backgrounded conversations.  An “In Memorium” display sobered one end of the displays, while nostalgia and news and food lubricated the rusty relationships.  There, under the waning daylight and beside the fire pit, the flowers and the expansive sky, a remote season, once again, drew near.  

 

Memories are mercurial – ephemeral even.  “Do you recall…?” someone would ask from this corner of the gathering, and then another.  And the answers varied.  “Yes.”  “No.”  “Kinda.”

 

Pictures helped.  Artifacts nudged.  For every anecdote reanimated, two were irretrievable. It has been a long time, and many roads have been traveled. Some things are dearly held, while others are best forgotten.  We don’t agree on which is which.

 

The evening crackled with laughter and conversation, and stories etched into older faces.  For a few hours we were younger again.  Me, as well, for though these were not “my people”, rooted in a school and a community 1000 miles from my own, their memories reanimated my own; their rapport refreshed the faces in my heart of names and personalities with whom I had shared classrooms, built homecoming floats, made music…and a life.  “Me,” along with the other spouses along for the ride.  We, too, listened and told stories and found our places in narratives that preceded us.  It was nourishing to inhabit, if only for an evening, deeper recesses of my beloved’s life in which I had had no part, and vicariously to retrace a few of the lines of my own.  

 

And to marvel afresh at the myriad fingers that shape us.  

 

I have long found evocative the assertion of one of my teachers that, “We are all born human, but we become persons by our associations, our affiliations, our conflicts, our relationships.”  

 

On Friday evening, it was good to touch our fingers, again, on the cooled forge that formed at least a part of the persons we’ve become.  

 

And to give thanks for the gift of those days, and this one.