Home: 13 Meditations
“Home is where one starts from.” (T. S. Eliot)
I was born overseas; my dad was stationed in Germany with the Canadian Air Force. I do not remember this first home. I was not even one year old when we came back. My mother says it was an apartment and the landlady lived next door. There were a lot of steps – she mentions how hard it was too herd three small girls (all under five) outside every day. The Pram (how very European) was kept by the front door. I vaguely remember seeing a pram somewhere in my childhood travels between my parent’s houses. It sounds very different from anywhere else I’ve ever lived except perhaps Montreal – which is also, in some parts, very European.
“When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but the childhood.” (Sam Ewing)
I spent the next thirteen years running wild throughout my small town. My friends and I had the run of main street, went to the playground unsupervised, and occasionally, hitched-hiked the ten miles or so to the lake. The lake my grandparents lived on was closer to their house (it was only about a city block out of town) so I spent more of my childhood there unsupervised. Well, not really unsupervised just not directly supervised. It was a village – everybody kept on eye on each others’ children and everybody was always free to scold us, repair a boo-boo or send us home. It was a wonderful, free childhood and I mourn its passing not just for me but because I know that my great nieces/nephews will probably never know that kind of freedom. Yes, I’m all for a free-range childhood!
“If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (Gaston Bachelard)
I spent a lot of my childhood day-dreaming. I was a reader. I lived next door to the library. I got to take out six books at a time. I felt rich. My first books were fairy tales populated by princesses, dragons, unicorns, ogres and witches. We weren’t allowed to sit inside in front of the television (why bother – there were only two channels and very little children’s programming). We had a front porch and along the back shelves were the high heels that my mother no longer wore. We wore them out pretending to be ladies and all grown-up. Inside the house (small as it was), I had two favourite places (under my mom’s bed and at the back of my sister’s closet) to hide, read and day-dream in. I felt sheltered, protected, and peaceful there at home.
“I live in my own little world. But its ok, they know me here.” (Lauren Myracle)
I was different from my sisters and my cousins. My family tolerated my bookish ways. I was not athletic. I never could never do the shoot the duck move in figure skating. I was not musical. I had one lesson – the teacher said it was hopeless and a waste of money for me to continue on with piano lessons. I can kinda swim. It took me until I was eleven to pass beginner swimming (that’s a story in itself). I was different. I created my own world. They knew (and tolerated) me and my eccentricities.
“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.” (Christian Morgenstern)
I was understood. I was home. I was blessed. (Which was very good – because the outside world could be cold and dark and scary). They didn’t always like me but they always understood!
“Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.” (Dermot Bolger – The Journey Home )
There was freedom there. The freedom to explore and read and dream. It was there I became resilient. It was there I learned who I was. It was there that I saw myself as myself and saw myself as they saw me. I was a reader. I was a dreamer. I was a quiet child. I was perfect just the way I was.
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” (Edith Sitwell)
I am a cold weather child. I do not tolerate heat well. There are tales of me fainting from the heat at age seven. Give me a book, a blankie, a warm beverage and a sturdy chair then I am comfortable. I am home. Summer never feels like home. Spring is the dreaded precursor to Summer. Fall is the best – cool nights, brilliant sunsets, heavenly full moons and the occasional welcome blast of heat.
“Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.” (Shauna Niequist – Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
I have many homes. I have my sisters’ homes. I have my stepmother’s home. I can fall asleep there as my two younger half-sisters knit and I dream. I can read in the house while my eldest sister gardens. I know where my step-mother keeps the everyday glasses. Their pets know me. My family is my home team and I hope that I am theirs.
Art Done by Family
“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.” (Elizabeth Kostova – The Historian)
I can walk into any library in the world and instantly feel at home. Decades ago, on our honeymoon trip, my ex and I explored libraries together. There is something about a library that says to me, “come in, you are welcome here. You are home!” I regret that when I was in Scotland I ignored the chance to pop into their National Library (I was physically thisclose to it but I was lost and sun-sick and tired and longing for a cool bath and a quiet room. I forgot where home was!). Home is an immense bibliotheque.
“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” (William Faulkner)
Not often enough. I am a home-body. Travel scares me. The unknown scares me. I like to meander into a place and stay until it feels like home. Rain feels like home. I love a good thunderstorm. No, I love being inside, safe and warm, during a thunderstorm. It feels likes home.
“ And then I laugh, because it’s so ridiculous and so gorgeous and it’s all I an do to not melt into a fit of giggles. So what if I’m ninety-three? So what if I’m ancient and cranky and my body’s a wreck? If they’re willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn’t I run away with the circus? It’s like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this IS home.” (Sara Gruen – Water For Elephants)
I am learning how to be home in my body. I’ve spent decades in my mind and only paying attention to my body when it yells at me. The older I get the more I realize that it is important to love your body and to treat it like the blessed home it is. I hope to be spry enough to run away with the circus or to a mountain cave when I am ninety-five.
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
(Beryl Markham – West with the Night)
Leaving home is like peeling of a band-aid – it is best to do it quick and clean. I leave quickly but I plan my leave-taking for months, years, decades. I knew at thirteen that I wasn’t staying in that small town forever. I knew at twenty-five that it was time to stop living in basement apartments. I knew at thirty that I had to try a big city at least once and so I planned and I left and somehow (ironically) I also keep coming back. I go from yearning for large to yearning for small.
“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” (L. Frank Baum – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)
As Dorothy so famously said – there’s no place like home. The hardest part is defining where home is and getting there!
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (Robert Frost)
Waiting For Lilacs
These four weeks between the middle of May and the middle of June are my second favourite time of the year as I watch and wait for the Lilacs to bloom. My most favourite time is October when the leaves are changing colour and morbid is in fashion.
Almost blooming…
We’ve had a few weeks of rain and sunshine. Spring is busting out all over; every where you look the world is morphing from winter brown to various shades of green.
Emerald green.
Grass green.
Pine green.
Spring green.
Budding…
I am a purist. I love lilac Lilacs the best. I use to think Lilacs only came in the one colour.
The Lilac trees beside my apartment’s parking lot are white and lilac, the ones across the street are a deep, dark purple.
I’ve yet to see blue lilacs.
Or Alexander Pink.
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
… … …
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
… … …
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
… … …
Above a cellar dug into a hill.
You are everywhere.
… … …
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—
… … …
The dead fed you
Amid the slant stones of graveyards.
Pale ghosts who planted you
Came in the nighttime
And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.
… … …
You are the smell of all Summers,
The love of wives and children,
The recollection of gardens of little children,
… … …
May is a green as no other,
May is much sun through small leaves,
May is soft earth,
And apple-blossoms,
And windows open to a South Wind.
May is full light wind of lilac
From Canada to Narragansett Bay.
… … …
Amy Lowell, “Lilacs”
Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Full Bloom…
The smell of Lilacs in the air speak to me of home.
When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d.
I didn’t know what a dooryard was until I read Ray Bradbury.
I had never heard of a dooryard.
I had played in front yards, back yards and side yards.
So you know – a door yard is a yard or garden by the door of a house.
Lilacs in the sky…
If I ever own a house, it will be surrounded by Lilacs.
And not just lilac Lilacs but also, blue, pink and white Lilacs.
Though this may be sacrilege, I’ve come to believe that all Lilacs stir my heart.
Though I’ll always love lilac Lilacs the best, there may be room in my garden for the others as well.
Not Lilacs … 
“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
T.S. Eliot
Is it Art or is it Nature?
I was walking home from class on Monday and looked up. I actually looked at the trees lining the street a block from Victoria School, perhaps because something colourful appeared in the corner of my eye.
It was a bird’s nest and right then and there I made a mental note to myself to take my camera on Tuesday morning so that I could take some pictures.
It was then (Tuesday morning) that I noticed it was not one nest in one tree on Broadway but many nests in many trees from Five Corners to Oskayak High School.
I wondered what this was all about.
I postulated that this was a Victoria School project; something to do with nature & Spring & birds.
Some of the nests were very bright like this pink & yellow bowl shaped nest.
They appeared to be made out of yarn.
I wondered if this was another form of yarnbombing; some local trees had been dressed up in scarves this last winter.
Perhaps a Bluebird family would like this blue nest for their home.
Or perhaps it could become a cradle for some baby blue robin eggs.
Isn’t it amazing what you might find when you look up.
You might see nests. You might see spirals. You might see beads.
And, on occasion, you might see birds.
Or bees.
Or squirrels.
Or a pink feather blowing gently in the breeze.
Though not today, today it is raining.
It has rained most of this week.
I have been carrying my umbrella.
I was glad I was carrying an umbrella.
Not just because it protected me from the rain.
But also because I could use it to reach the nests.
Most of the nests were way up high; I couldn’t reach them even when I stood on tippy-toes.
I wanted to see one up close.
I wanted to hold it in my hands.
I wanted to see what the nests were made of.
If the nests were made of yarn, the birds could pick them apart and use the material to augment their nest building.
Instead of dull brown nests we would see nests infused with colour.
This time of year, I like to put out strands of my hair for the birds to use in their nest building.
Hair and yarn makes their nests warm, cozy, bright and colourful.
I couldn’t knock a nest off with my umbrella.
It looks like my curiosity would never be satisfied.
But then, on Saturday, I was at the grocery store and saw that there was a nest that I could reach and untie from the tree.
The nest I liberated from the tree is made of wire, perhaps like this one (scroll to the bottom).
When I got home and did a quick web search.
The nests are Art and a school project by Monique Martin.
Here are pictures of the tree installation and the exhibit.
I liked the nests better when I thought they were made of yarn.
Yarn nests could be re-purposed by nature – the birds could pick them apart and they would eventually decompose.
Wire nests are just Art.
Yarn nests would have been both Art and Nature.
Rain
It was raining this morning when I walked to work. A cold, late Fall, be thankful it’s not snow, type of rain. This is Pre-Winter rain. Cold, bleak… a rain that chills you to the bone. A foreboding rain just in time for election day! I voted anyway. 
google image search
I have lived in Saskatchewan, on and off, for many decades. I have made a study of the rains.
There are blustry spring rains. They are Winnie the Pooh rains; rains that tear the umbrella out of your hands and turn it inside out. These are the rains that drench you to the bone and are quickly gone but leave your socks soaked and your spirit damp. These are the rains that push Piglet and Eyore off the page.
There are calm summer storms; rains that last all day but fall gently on the earth nourishing it. Soft rains where you don’t need an umbrella because you don’t mind getting wet. This is usually a warm rain. This is the rain I enjoy walking through.
There are wild summer storms that race across the prairies drenching and raging at the soil. I use to stand on my balcony, at the edge of the city, and watch this type of storm slowly make its way into the city. This could last all day. I would see a rain cloud form miles away and hours later it still would not be here. It was a leisurely rain. It was enjoying taking its time. You had hours to prepare to go out into the rain. However, you did not want to go out for the wild storm would rage at you and leave you feeling destitute.
As a child, one of my favorite activities after the rain, was to follow the streams across town pretending that they were rivers and that I was smaller than I actually was. I wanted to be small and big at the same time. I wanted to tell the rain’s story by reading the streams.
