A weekend in the country

On Friday, I went home for the first time in three years.

They say home is where the heart is. That is certainly true. I have felt at home in a number of places over the past few years of my life: Williams, Sweden, Cape Cod, New York City, Morocco, etc. However, moving to Sweden, for all the opportunity and experience it offered, also brought a feeling of displacement. I love Stockholm, but I will never truly claim it as my own. Even my house in Windsor, which has, for the past three years, stood empty and shrouded, was no longer my home. The empty rooms and barren walls contained no warmth, and childhood memories took on a bizarre, warped quality that seemed distant and not a little foreboding. But on Friday night, with my whole family piled into the car as we hurtled up the long dirt drive, I saw my house in a new light, a soft glow in several of the windows, cars in the driveway, and a tractor out front. It no longer looked ghost-like and imposing. The inside of the house is an odd blur of activity and production now; swatches of different colored paint (egg-shell versus gingerbread) checker the walls, furniture is scattered in odd corners, tools lie in unexpected places. The container holding most of our furniture and belongings is still slowly chugging its way across the Atlantic, so we are making due with what's left in the house. And despite all the activity, I felt so settled. Finally.

I woke up at 6:30 on Saturday morning, in time to drive Lily to Holiday Farm, where she is working for the summer. When I got back to the house, I headed out for a run, ignoring my mother's warnings about the vicious deer flies. There's no way anything sane is up at 7 in the morning.

False.

I lasted 15 minutes, before turning around, booking up the driveway, flailing milkweed stalks in both hands in a vain attempt to discourage the persistent creatures. I fell into the house, crying "I SURRENDER!". It felt wonderfully melodramatic.

The rest of the day passed in a both active and comfortable fashion. Breakfast on the porch, impromptu head shots taken by a colleague of my father's, a visit to our family farm, fresh picked vegetables for lunch, the pleasure of polishing a tarnished silver bowl that belonged to my father and his grandfather before him, the scent of earth, air, and trees that I've been missing so much, and the discovery of an old photo-album of my mothers - all long legs, tube socks, seventies hair-cuts and adolescent boyfriends.

So many people go to the woods and stumble upon a great discovery. Thoreau discovered enlightenment in the form solitude. Rosalind discovered independence in the form of Ganymeade. The cast of "A Little Night Music" discovered a whole lot of things. And me? I went to the woods and found my home, right where I left it. It was, and is, refreshing beyond my ability to express.