Home again.

Here we are.

It seems strange sitting down to write in this dim corner of the front room. There is a fireplace behind me quietly waiting for the truly cold weather and a cord of wood to burn. The Impling prances around in the other front room...what was once a dining room but is now a dining/ library/cello practice room. It is also temporarily holding all the paintings, finished and unfinished, that I have yet to either hang or haul up to my little office/studio with the sloping ceiling and window overlooking an apple tree and the road that leads to a farm where the cat is friendly and the pony and horse peek calmly from their stalls at an absolutely mesmerized Impling, and the dancer/organic farmer who owns it all tends her chickens and fields for the fun of it.

Here in this corner, I think of our favorite room, through the library/dining/music room, through the mud room, through a glass door with its tarnished brassy handle, into the great, bright room. It is a large space, larger than anything I've ever lived in. Coming from a small apartment, this house seemed overwhelming the first few nights. But as the days go by, we expand to fill the space. This is not so much due to us appropriating new stuff, as a more personal expansion, like breathing deeply and exhaling, and expanding with each breath until we fill the bigger spaces around us with our thoughts, and our laughter, our chats and our tears, our music and our puttering sounds.

I feel bigger, somehow, looser, as if part of myself is both inside and outside all at once. The great room is so bright with windows and skylights that it's more or less a room outside. It overlooks the fields and the herb garden where the Impling and I weeded this morning. We donned our hats, and gloves, and after a protective layer of bug spray, we set off to work. We saw earthworms, and beetles and mosquitos and bees, we turned over the earth and tore out weeds and flung them aside, leaving behind the fresh overturned soil and space for our spearmint, sage, marjoram, tarragon (or little dragon, as we now call it), and a host of other herbs I can no longer remember, to grow. While we were working, the previous owners of the house came by and gave us a rather nostalgic tour of both the herb garden and the vegetable garden, naming plants for me and pulling at the gigantic weeds as if they just couldn't help it. I would miss these gardens too, if I moved away after four years of tending them.

They brought us an apple picker, with advice to leave the windfall for the deer. I can't imagine picking apples yet as the veggie garden still looks like the forest primeval. And I have at least four or five more burdock plants to dig up. Burdock man. One tough weed. But I have my shovel, my arms, (stronger now from all the construction of furniture and lifting and carrying of boxes and the Impling), and my innate stubborn nature to help me dig down and down into that clean smelling earth and pry up the great weeds that threaten our dill and tomatoes. It is a good battle. It is a good new world.

Comments

[Fairly Odd Mother]

This sentence? "This is not so much due to us appropriating new stuff, as a more personal expansion, like breathing deeply and exhaling, and expanding with each breath until we fill the bigger spaces around us with our thoughts, and our laughter, our chats and our tears, our music and our puttering sounds."

Breathtaking.

Welcome to your new home.

[Velma]

Welcome home!

[Paula]

Thanks, guys!

I promise I'll be by to "visit" you all soon. I've a LOT of catching up to do.

And more weeding.

[Christine]

How wonderful for you! What a great post.

I remember my first home and the previous owners had taken time to plant an herb garden out back.

I didn't realize that until I smelled my hands after ripping up the "weeds" and realized they smelled oddly like Rosemary!!!!