Home Is (Blog Prompt 1)

This is home: Branches reaching for the sky in prayer above my head, tangles of thorns and thickets to run and hide in, trails that curl and disappear, plump raspberries, endless imagination.  I have lived here since I was three, which is as long as I can remember anyway. My brother and I did not sit in front of the TV. We pushed open the sliding glass door in our kitchen, bounded down the deck stairs, and got lost. Who needs TV when you have an entire forest at your disposal? 

When I look out at the woods in my backyard (my chosen place), my back a silhouette in the golden sunlight, I understand that this is where I belong. I suppose we have thought of moving in the last several months because the memories here are thick and warm as the smoke curling from the chimney, but we simply cannot leave. 

We cannot. 

This is where my brother and I snuck out of the house at 2 AM one morning to explore the trails across the road from our house. Home is where Dad built us a tree house in the backyard. It’s the place we crouched by little springs of frigid, flowing water and watched closely for frogs and crayfish and salamanders. As Wendell Berry writes in his poem, “Stay Home,” “In the stillness of the trees I am at home.” The trees are disappearing, now, though. To the left, new neighbors have chopped grandfatherly trees and cut thick, twisted bushes for fear that these behemoths will fall on their newly-built house. I say, why did you move to the woods? Across the road, where the forest used to be so thick you couldn’t see through, they have cut thousands of feet of trees for no reason I can see. The trunks lay there, sad and forgotten, silent. 

Home is where Dad planted a garden in the rocky soil and loved it kindly so that it would produce green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. It is where Mom planted flowers carefully in our front yard so that they would bloom bright reds and pinks and oranges. This is where she sewed seeds for hyacinth bushes that blossom sweet blues and pinks and purples. They smell like balloons to me when they celebrate spring.  Home is where we planted a still-miniature evergreen tree by our clothesline in the backyard. I glance at it every time I pull into my driveway and, now, I see that there is an “otherness” to it that Cronon would appreciate when he wrote, in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” that “The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect than the tree in the ancient forest…” 

Here, my imagination grew alongside the budding raspberries in July. My feet calloused from walking over rocks and sticks and cold dirt without shoes. My eyes widened as I watched Dad with pride when he nurtured his plants and gave them names I had never heard before. My trust in my brother developed when he protected me from falling trees (even if he did trip me with his next step).  This is my “wilderness.” It is so full of me and Dad and Mom and my brother that we cannot leave. 

"You stay home too" 

~"Stay Home" by Wendell Berry~