Homing in

It has been two weeks since we got the news that will make our lives radically different in the coming year. We introduced it yesterday through history. But there were few words about this momentous event itself, one sentence, a few phrases.

It has been two weeks since H and I began talking about a joint blog post that would introduce you to this news, a blog post that would share the thing that will change our lives for the foreseeable future.

But I have not known where to start. I have not had the words. Perhaps my husband does. Perhaps he will find them in the lined pages of a notebook he once used at work  Perhaps I will find them in a fountain pen with brown ink that belonged to my father. Perhaps they are in the hollow of a tree that a bird once used for a nest.

I do not have the words for something we have imagined but, speaking for myself, I never believed.

I do not have the words for that wish I made on countless stars.

How is it possible that when we have held something so close, and known it is so far away, an impossible distance away, how is it that when it is here, as close as in the hand, well maybe a bit farther than that,  how is it that there are no words for the place that is....home.

A place of breath sounds--my husband's and my own, and the cats.
A place of morning light through  kitchen windows and peepers at dusk.
A place of knowing that what one planted will come up in the Spring, and that there will be a Spring, and that one will be there, not "one" but we, that we will be there, that the cats will be there, and our friends.

And that they too will know this place, and that the bed will be shaped to meet them.

We will be merging our books, as we have merged our lives...and what better symbol of the tying of the proverbial knot, than the placing of books together?  Will we do it alphabetically? By genre? By happenstance? Will we place good "bedfellows together" so Terry Tempest Williams can speak with Grace Paley or Joe Coomer with Anne Michael? Marriage is the living together of books.

How is it possible that after uncounted years of paying others for the roof over one's head, the windows that keep one warm and keep one cool, that let one see out and let others see in; how is it possible that when the light falls, when it is not yet dark, but no longer day, those windows that permit reflection will be ours?

How is it possible that after uncounted years of paying others for the hearth on which to cook the food that nourishes, the food that fills the empty spaces, the food that joins friends together in laughter and yes, tears, how is it that that hearth will be our hearth, the place at which we welcome each other with candles and flowers from the garden, with bread and wine and honey and salt. In the Jewish tradition, bread is the stuff of life and salt the symbol of flavor and the emblem of tears, and honey, the marker of the sweet. "May you have flavor, and tears of sadness to illuminate the joy, and sweet at the end of day," I thought as I brought these gifts to others. Now I will place them on the table, our table, at my husband's plate, and at mine.

How is it that there will be the dust in the corners, the debris of forgotten parties? Our dust. And a forgotten dime. An earring. A shoelace.

How is it that we will know what it is to lie on the grass and smell the dirt, that we will shape it to our desire? And that we will watch the first snowfall. The first green leaf.

I imagine walking to each tree and greeting it. I imagine bringing plants from where I have lived and introducing them to those that grew up here.

I imagine bringing the ashes of my dogs, the one that lies now where I grew up, on a spit of land by the ocean, to lie beside the ashes of the dog that lived a short distance away, that died in the snow of early Spring. And both of them will bracket the boy-girl rabbit who was fierce and self-possessed and beautiful, and they will lie at peace together looking over the  town.

What is this thing, this longing to know that each day, when we rise from bed, we place our feet on our own floor, before all else; that when we draw water it comes from our own land, and when we drink, it is from our own well...

We "well up" with tears and with gratitude and with the belief that here, in this place, we will pass days and nights and days again, beside the road, beside the town, beside the mountains that rise to enclose us in a community we love.

We are coming home. At last. Here.