On Homecoming

It’s now a week before Thanksgiving. Six weeks ago, 11 and I moved. We exchanged a fully paid-off trailer and acreage surrounded by crawfish ponds and a deafening quiet kind of country 45 minutes away from my parents for a mortgage in a tiny neighborhood (I use this word loosely) five minutes down the road from the house I grew up in. Two years post-divorce, we have finally left the last dredges of that old life behind us.

I had lived rural for nearly all of my life (minus the handful of years where a burgeoning, yet feigned independence looked like tiny apartments fashioned out of milk crates and thrifted futons, with nary a bed frame in sight); so long that I have forgotten what it is like to live in such close proximity to other humans. After my daughter arrived, the promise of property and a quiet life was a means to manage me. Occupied can be the mother of oblivious, after all.

While I don’t miss the difficulties and responsibilities of maintaining the acreage, the apocalyptic hordes of mosquitoes, crop dusters every morning, and waking up to stray donkeys in the back yard, there are other things I miss.

Mostly, I miss the night sky. The bands of the Milky Way were often visible. Every meteor shower was a chance to lay in the yard in amazement. It was easy to keep perspective when you’re encompassed by cosmos older than time itself. It is navel-gazing in the most sincere, humble form. That night sky was a balm to an ever-encroaching ache I had no name for. I saw the universe, and the universe saw me — and my unanswered efforts, my resignation, and my rediscovery. There was the benefit of laying out my admittedly excessive crystal collection to be cleansed in the full moon without whispers of “heathen” and “witch”. I could bury jars to my heart’s content at 1 a.m. I yelled at possums and various wildlife without someone calling in a wellness check. I also miss the excessive amount of kitchen cabinets.

Grounding was also very easy in the middle of this mass of property. Shoes off, feeling the earth and her reassurance — it was wonderful. Land has always been a tether for me, and this land was Mine.

Here, it is different. It is also Mine, though grounding feels strange, there’s too much energy coursing underneath. I will adjust, I suppose. Though having a privacy fence still lets me crystal cleanse in peace. Some neighbors work nights, some I’ve never seen. A while this is a “neighborhood”, it really is only three small streets of houses surrounded by farms and cows and horses and coyotes.

I have always been the friend that gets touted as having the “cozy home”. A trait I take much pride in. I have always been very good at keeping a home, making it a warm space, a home base. Which certainly comes in handy as a homeschooling mom amid a coronovirus lockdown for much of the year.

Someone commented last weekend that they didn’t understand how within a month of moving, my house already felt like home, branded very “me”. It was inviting, smelled like a warm hug, and it just let you…be. It let you exist within in its walls, as you are, with no conditions, no prerequisite.

What some people don’t understand is that I HAVE to. It has often felt as if I had no safe place. My life was a tumultuous battlefield, both for mind and body. The only thing I had for comfort, for a steadying hand, were those walls.

So I had to find peace where I could. No, not find peace — make it, for myself.

Now we are very close to my parents, both in location and in emotion. They have been my unwavering support system from the moment I emerged earthside in true “me” fashion — but that’s another entry. This chapter of my life is no exception. 11 is beside herself with the idea of living so close to her favorite people in the world. There is comfort and promise in passing roads I learned to drive on, seeing homes where once only fields stood, the exact fields we invaded to watch the braver ones drink Boone’s Farm and MD 20/20, our group lording around a bonfire while learning and practicing how to grow up, bloated egos with the unearned knowledge that we’d most certainly be prepared for the real world, for adulthood. Notes of smoke and fertilizer and pipe dreams and hopes that would be set down somewhere we’d eventually forget, never to be picked up again.

And I must say, this time around it is a joy to create this home, this cornerstone, for me and my daughter.

We can breathe as deep and as long and as loud as we want.

We have finally come home.