Our one wild and precious year

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At first it was just a house. After almost a year of looking-lite and then two weeks of intense looking, we found a house and moved in on New Years Eve. Maybe it wasn't until later, much later, almost a year's worth of days having gone by, when we brought our Christmas tree into the living room,  that it finally felt like our home. Maybe it was the afternoon the neighbor took down the dying tree, the last of the Ivy and English laurel - both non-native species that had been chocking the yard. Maybe it was the morning after Tim had removed the final obstructions and we saw what the foliage and tree canopy had been hiding from our view, the mountain. Maybe that day, is the day it became home. Or maybe it was the day when we returned from blending our families, on the other side of the same mountain. Maybe on that day, having joined as a family on one side of the mountain, we returned to live at the foot of the other side.  Maybe it was that day it became home.

Before that day and for many days thereafter, we watched the boys grow. We spent pandemic days together in a home office while the boys made a dig-site outside and elaborate pillow forts inside.  We celebrated the end of winter, the coming of spring. We watched our front yard burst with color and were complimented on the most luxurious lawn on the street. The boys harvested pears from our pear tree, and blueberries from the blueberry bush. Tim discovered that pears make a sauce, much like apples and that it cans well and tastes, as the boys say, "delectable." The boys discovered that salamanders can be made to feel at home - for a brief time - in a bucket full of mud, with some rocks and twigs, until a guilty mother, sneaks out in the middle of the night to set the salamander free.  

There were rivers and and cooking and carving and planting. ​

There was planning for the big day in September. And tasting cake and ordering dresses and suits and watching ducks. In the middle of it all, we found time for a modified camping trip, also known as day-tripping with a tent.   We smiled a lot.

We masked up. We started school. Tim made gluten-filled gooey treats for all the kids (big and small.)  

In this pandemic world, home takes on a whole new depth of feeling. It is a safe place. It is all the places. It is family. It is work. It is respite. It is celebration.

It is love.

At the center of this, our wild and precious year, was a blending of families. With cousins and aunties and uncles. With siblings and parents and friends. On the other side of the mountain,  on the last official day of summer. 

We made home.