I fell in love slowly. Only once I understood the skies, and the storms, and the bend of the trees by the pond, and those by the bay, and those by the field.

It took a long time to know this wild space. The thicket I walked right past for years, until I noticed, finally, its small orange berries one lonely fall day. The squiggled tree where the egret sits, the pine tree where the owl calls, the way the grasses turn red in late August.  All of this I misunderstood, because I didn’t stand still, or stay quiet, or look up, or look closer.

Sometimes, years went by from the couch or the chair, and the world rose quickly from the pane of a window someone else put before me, or I put myself behind — and all that was wild went on without me. Elsewhere. On snow days and summer nights, in fleeting moments between staring at screens, I had dreams of lands I’d never know, and imagined beauty that belonged to everyone else. It’s true, I heard the peepers and the saw the full moon on the first warm night; even I could hear the loon cry, and feel the ancient yearn of a sky full of stars or swallows. Even then, the wild called to me.

But I didn’t know the way she was. That she was more than the backdrop for my morning commute, and that there was more to be known than a Saturday could teach. I didn’t know the way she was at all.

I fell in love slowly. Only once I saw the way she moves in solitude, by a grey sea, or green hill, or through the narrow path across the shadowed margins of the day. Only once I knew where the apple blossoms were, and the hollowed trunk, and the massive roots. I know now how the chill comes, the way the frost heaves, and all the ways the sky is blue. Like all great loves, I know the curve of her now. She is my home, now.  And I would be nowhere else but here, in this late afternoon light; wild, seen, known, and loved.

Post vacation is so hard. Two realities colliding – all that you are coming home to, all that you are leaving behind, both existing in the same moment. This is the day after, and the day before. And this is the day that’s particularly hard to get through.

I’m walking in large circles around my exhausted suitcase, contemplating unpacking. I’m walking in large circles around next steps, contemplating going back to bed.

My eyes keep tearing up. I’m lonely. I miss mother and my 5 brothers and sisters and their partners and spouses and kids and grandkids and the chaos that was a family vacation. It’s my first day home, and it’s just so quiet – just Gilligan snoring on the couch and the click of the keyboard to keep my company.
There were moments during the last 2 weeks when any silence sounded like heaven to me. All that clattering around in a tiled beach house – all those blaring rooms decorated in hospital pastels. Moments stuffed with too much happening, kitchens stuffed with too many people, lamps stuffed with too many seashells. (In case of deafening emergency, break glass and shove seashells in your ears).
The pace always changes on vacations, but for me it speeds up instead of slows down. Always places to be, places to go, places to arrive. Long lines at the dairy queen, impossible lines at the grocery store, endless lines of traffic across the bridge, on the beltway, through security. People everywhere, on every surface, in every conceivable corner. And someone always to love you, and for you to always love.

And then home.

Trying to settle in, I take a walk and two great herons rise above me, so close I can feel the air rush from their wings. The sky is an impossible neon blue and the breeze from the bay lifts me, after the airless, humid skies of North Carolina. But even here the heat has arrived. The tiger lilies are almost gone. Yarrow and toadflax and cow parsley are the sole survivors – ready for the driest, hottest days to come. The fields look spent and thirsty, the pond a sleepy green.

And the sound of my own heart is a surprise; leftover love spilling everywhere. I miss them all, but I’m grateful to be back. I’m somewhere between where I wanted to be, and where I need to go. I’m caught between breaths, in the bittersweet stillness of my own hushed and holy arrival home.