November 2013

How big is your house?       

And how big is your home?

Our house is only 900 square feet, and a lot of that is compromised by furniture, a big dog and books. That’s why I choose to think of my home in a much broader sense than just the four walls that hold up the roof I find shelter under.   Our home stretches out about seven acres around out house, mostly to the back and into Carnation Marsh bird sanctuary. Because the property line is not defined by a neighbor’s fence or hedge it is really hard to know how big our home is.  It my mind it stretches even farther some days to either end of out valley road, especially when I am on foot.

In a few days I will be getting on a jet to head home. The home of my youth Milwaukee, and the home of my parents in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. All places I still call home. Though when I get on the jet at Billy Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee on December 3^rd I will also be flying home.

I love this expansive feeling of home.

I rarely take or post pictures of our home, the land that our house rests on, the land we garden. I just seem to be so busy with other things when I’m here. But the other day I broke from the norm and took some photos of the last of the fall color around here.

A little filler until I return home from home and write more about home.

[I can’t believe it ‘s been a month since Michael and I drove eastward to Curlew Lake for a few days of fishing and relaxing. So fast and far has time travelled. My intention to write immediately, has become an exercise in memory.]

I had found cabin #13 online, though the year before I had driven past Curlew Lake on a return trip from Blue Stem Nursery on Lake Christine in British Columbia. This remote part of Washington had an appeal, partly because it was far enough away to feel totally different than our valley home and partly because it was simply beautiful. Fisherman’s Resort where we rented cabin#13 was a homely place in it’s lack of pretension and run down condition, yet it’s position on a peninsula jutting into the narrow 7 mile long Curlew Lake—more like a bloated deep river— was lovely.

The days were perfect: dry, crisp, yet with a sun that still warmed. The nights star-slathered and cold. Though in no way was this place exotic (a 6 hour drive nearly to Canada, nearly to Idaho) the ancient pine-felted mountains and glacier sculpted valleys had a comforting unfamiliarity.

The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips said, “The most uncanny place is one’s home. As in it appears to be the most familiar place, but in fact it is the most unfamiliar”. So why was I zinging with nostalgia in this unfamiliar place? Certainly the 50-year-old linoleum floor was the same Sears linoleum that covered the wreck room of the house I grew up in. But there were more mysterious signals. The piney smoke in the evening air smelled of someplace I could not place. Someplace I had nestled in: hung my hat, laid my head. Recalling maybe the brief months I lived on the Island of Elba, or in Sequoia National Park where I washed dishes for a few months before coming to Seattle. Places I called home briefly, and so never really left, the longing to return an attachment much stronger than to any of my “long-term” homes.

But what spoke of home the most was the changeable surface of the water. I have spent many days on lakes, especially in my home state, Wisconsin, staring at the surface of the water as it folds and unfolds like a card trick. The hypnosis-inducing motion calms me. It was crazy how quickly I was subdued by this tranquil place, set free of my anxieties and stresses in ways my home, my domicile never can. Our farm in the Snoqualmie Valley is a demanding place, whether it is spring planting or fall harvesting, or a rug to vacuum and dishes to wash.  I did wash dishes in cabin #13, but very few and in the calm state of mind it felt meditative, not just another thing to do.

Michael and I had talked about moving here. We do that nearly everywhere we go, a symptom of the never ending search of our restless souls for home. But as we explored the idea: the great distances to hospitals, airports, friends and family, the harsh winters and short hot dry summers we decided quickly against it. I think the home we long for wasn’t that place, or any place, at all. It was the smooth tranquility of the surface of the lake, fishing pole in hand, not catching a thing.

We did eventually catch some fish near the end of our brief stay. And meandered home through the sublime arid landscape of eastern Washington. Nothing could feel farther from home and yet be so close to the soggy hollow in which we live than these austere landscapes.

So why do I feel so at home in them?

Roosevelt Lake, actually the impounded Columbia River, behind the Grand Coulee Damn.

The rolling ancient sand dunes of Swawilla Basin with Roosevelt Lake in the background.

Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) one of the last plants blooming at Dry falls State Park.

Back to the car and back home; our last stop at Dry Falls State Park.