Returning to uncomfortable questions
Seeing home afresh
Mid-September, 2023
Returning home holds a hint of the anticipation in seeing a lover after time. Will we find each other changed? Will the attraction still be there?
I imagined arriving home for about 24-hours of taxis, crowded airports, and cramped seats. But when I finally walked through our back door, I felt a strange detachment; as if looking at an old photograph. The objects, colours and textures were recognisable, but there was a sense of something being amiss. This moment, when the familiar becomes strange, is a precious opportunity for perspective, and one that I was perhaps too jet-lagged to really appreciate. This is when it’s possible to see how we have changed between leaving and returning.
Unsurprisingly for me, everything felt small and cramped. And it was so quiet that my ears rang for the first two days. I’d adjusted to the supersized culture of the urban US with its giant roaring trucks, eight-laned highways, buckets of sweet coffee, and towering glass-fronted blocks. For the first few days I was still moving to a phrenetic rhythm and found things quaint; the fact that, in its entirety, our local Co-op is smaller than the foyer of the shopping mall in Spokane, or that driving along winding country roads in my little car made me feel like a child at the fair.
But as the jet-lag faded, so did the idiosyncrasies of home, and normal life resumed. Part of me wanted to keep that feeling of the familiar made fresh. This trip had brought some difficult questions to the fore, particularly about the compatibility between a travelling career and rural living. Could I, and should I, be married to an acre of high-maintenance ground, when I was also married to a conductor who perhaps could do with more of my company and support on the road?
I walked around our garden which had enjoyed two undisturbed weeks of prime growing weather, and knew that I’d need to dedicate at least three days to untangling plants from weeds, removing weighty layers of sodden grass, pruning, deadheading, harvesting and storing.
And so I left it, and all those unwieldy questions, to fester for two days. And just when I was feeling ready to apply some muscle, the air became agitated with an oncoming storm. It howled and crashed around our house for a day and night1, and when the sun rose the air was still hazy with fine debris. The long grasses were littered with shards of bark, cracked branches and leaves that had been torn away still green. There was a heavy scent of fresh wood, mushroom and disturbed earth while Humphrey and I picked our way around the local woods. Everything around us looked as I felt inside.
I was strangely relieved to see the veg garden flattened. The bean supports, sweetpea tower, cucumber trellis, and all tall plants had been twisted around or snapped at the base. I harvested everything I could, and prepared most of it for the freezer. And once the plants and broken canes were tidied away, the newly bare space calmed me.
My old friend insomnia returned, which meant I had more opportunity to see the sunrise. The air was so warm that I found myself wandering the paddock in my pyjamas early one morning, noticing, with a sigh, my failed attempts to reduce the forest of knapweed. But their rising stalks and black seedheads were strangely pleasing in the first light. Goldfinches love eating their seed, and with 500% more red admiral this year, the flowers had been well used, too. Perhaps, I thought, things don’t need so much of my interference to be OK.
I found four wind-fallen apples in the long grass, and went back towards the house with their cold wet weight in my pyjama pockets. Before I reached the door, the high echoes of geese made me stop. It is a sound that sews time together like patches of a vast quilt. They move with an outbreath in winter, and return as spring inhales life back into the land.
And although my chest ached to think I might not always hear them passing through these open skies over our little acre, they reminded me that the most important things would not come to an end.
Looking back through my diary, I see that the same things happened at roughly this time last year. Our neighbour farmer later told me that strong winds at the equinox are to be expected, and I wonder if the lowering angle of the sun causes a release of heat stored in the land creating a dramatic movement of thermals. One way or another, I can perhaps expect to lose any vertical structures in the garden as autumn arrives.