Where I Live

in two parts

Day

The rhythm of my footsteps is like a heartbeat.  I walk today in the undulating fields by our home in southwest New Hampshire; green, open and innocent.  In the crisp, cut hay-grass, I relax into myself.  These fields are actually one unbroken landscape in the shape of a rugged ‘C’ that surrounds the back and sides of our little house.  I relish this walk, this time of swinging arms and legs while breathing big chest breaths, for it is not all year that I can walk here easily.  In deep summer, before the hay is cut, and in deep winter, too, the obstacles, both grasses and snow, can be hip deep.  At those times I can gaze out upon them dreamily from my mown yard perched just above, enjoying watching the sea of shifting colors and shade, and the occasional crossing of turkeys, hawks, deer, foxes and humans.  But it is not until I can get out into the fields; running with a kite, walking into the mist on a summer evening, flying downhill with a child on a sled, that I receive its best gifts:  a subtle and energizing spaciousness opening within inner spaces of heart and soul where there had been tension.  Call it a blooming of my flower-heart.

Every time I enter it, this field graces me with another, tiny, healing.  The effect is so quiet as to be unnoticeable at times.  It is analogous to discovering a personal ‘attic’; the forgotten room-self of dreams where one reconnects with a larger sense of herself beyond roles, and finds a brief doorway out of the routines of a settled life and into rooms of unlimited possibility.  For me it has proven to be a simple and profound way to shift perspectives and lighten a mood.

As I move through these sweeping field nuances, listening to crickets or red-winged blackbirds and often with the smell of wet earth lifting up to fill my nose, our Black Labrador dog trots along.  I have to thank her for getting me out of the house in the first place.  Once we are beyond doors I can enter a connectedness with my senses that is vast and satisfying, and which unleashes creative thought.   Flooded with aesthetics I sometimes sit in the sun to ponder a painting I am working on, or to resolve a career direction, or wonder how in the world to be an effective mother to two boys.    Over seventeen years I have crisscrossed and circumnavigated these planes of field in many ways; alone, pregnant, with children and especially with my husband.  Yet I am sure there are one hundred thousand other ways to move there that are as yet unexplored.   Unlike our country road I often use for exercise—down one side and back the other for two or three miles—this earth for me is like the body of a beloved one with muscles and curves, with folds so attractive and comforting that I am made happier by coming upon them another time; seeing anew the simple perfect beauty of a tuft of red clover.

Evening

At the hairline of the field is a woods.  The woods go deep and mostly undisturbed by development for several miles.  It is of course a quiet place, with a pristine stream, extensive wetlands and sinewy hills.  In a particularly fine bend of the hairline of the woods is a stand of Aspens. These lithe and eager trees were much smaller when I first arrived.  I have watched them withstand forces of ice storms and drought, pitied their black scars and scoliotic adaptations, and taken some degree of pride in their survival.  Their metaphors of growth, of multiplying sapling ‘families’ spreading, and of unsentimental life cycles continue to show themselves to me as I need them.

This hairline is the spot where my husband and I were married.  We had a circle mowed in the summer grass, and discreetly invited our closest family and friends to join us on an August afternoon as we tied the knot.  Together our group formed an unbroken circle, standing for and witnessing the potential of our new union.  I know the nearby coyotes, whose ancestral lines go back here far longer than I have lived, were witness to this act of courage and optimism.  Now, tonight, and many years later, as I sit at the window seat in our home facing west to the field on a balmy October night, the full moon lights that Aspen bark in the distance.  Through the open windows I can hear the coyotes howl and yip to us from their dens beyond, reminding us of our promises to each other. 

I wonder sometimes how one piece of land can be so inspirational.  I don’t know this for certain, but I feel for me it comes from the creating of a bond.  I have bonded to this little piece of earth like a child to a backyard woods.  Yet this bond is so far beyond the parks and woodlands I had known as a child in the suburbs of Massachusetts.  And, as is similar to the bonds created between people in relationships of all kinds; with notions of stability, comfort and refuge, and of receptivity on both parts, time brings a trust that allows for infinite encounters and reckonings.  I may not always live in this house by this field of hay, but it has given me so much.  When winter comes and the deep snow is crusty-hard I will walk out there in the darkness under a moon as round and radiant as this one.  I will be dressed from head to toe in down and wool.  And I will lie on my back to look up at the stars to ask the big questions.   I have faith now that in the stillness and the blackness of that night with those big questions the guidance will come, that this behemoth of an adviser whose skin I rest upon will deliver the answers to me in a way that I understand and can move forward with.

Before I move away, though, I will go to the hairline of the woods where we were married.  I will deftly dig up a little sapling, being especially cautious of its roots, and take it with me to wherever my new home will be.  Like family.