A Place Called Home

What is Home?

The place I have lived in for 15 years is situated in a one-mile by one-mile square-like area bordered by two graveled roads and a primary paved road. It’s part of a larger rural area that is 15 miles outside of a small village that has no traffic lights. My home is 2400 feet in elevation and requires a gradual climb into the foothills of the Cascade Range of southern Washington State. I often describe it as "30 minutes from everywhere."

My place represents significant change and growth in all aspects of my life. I abandoned a career and suburban existence to move here. I felt deeply the need to change my lifestyle after living in urban and suburban settings for 50 years. My friends called it my mid-life crisis; I agreed 100%. I was 50, and my crisis was a life of discontent, boredom, and an increasing amount of personal rumination circling the question, “Is this it?” I envisioned living closer to a wilder form of nature, relishing the quiet of the country, experiencing four distinct seasons, creating connections in the small village down the hill, and most of all, spending my days outside.

My life of crisis was comfortable, predictable, and secure; a safety net I created after a chaotic childhood and a reckless and self-destructive spate of teenage choices. Equipped with a healthier mindset, some cash, and energy I was ready for a new challenge.

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”—Gail Sheehy.

In the fall of my second year here, I was widowed unexpectedly in one night. A deputy knocked at my door at 4:30 am with the grim news that my husband of thirty years had died in another state. My grief was complicated and at times profound. City friends urged me to return to the city - to come home - I couldn’t possibly live here alone. But it was too late; my heart was now part of this new place I called home. Instead, I went to my fenced garden and planted a year’s supply of garlic between breath-stopping sobs and silent weeping.

My home is surrounded by towering Douglas firs, creating a sanctuary that offers protection from this region’s infamous winds. My relationships with native plants are personal: the gawky and prolific elderberry shrubs provide spring flowers and late-summer berries for my winter wellness. The wildlife had become familiar (Latin root: familiaris, meaning “belonging to a family”): the ravens who fly over and greet me with a loud caw as I work in my garden, the deer who sleep in the pasture, the spring arrival of the swallows who perch on the electrical cable, eagerly trying to mate, and those adorable but irksome pocket gophers who dug up my garden crops for several years. Occasional sightings of bear and cougar - from a distance - immediately charge my body for awareness and action.

It’s here that I learned to see the nuance of light and dark. The fourteen hours of light of the northern spring that keeps me in the garden until 9 pm; the intense overhead sun of the summer that forces me into the garden at dawn, and my favorite, the diffused low light of autumn highlighting the pasture’s dying golden grasses. Winter’s darkness fits comfortably into my seasonal life; my body is tired from the outdoor joys of summer and fall and appreciates the longer sleeps and silent mornings made for reading and writing.

On most days of the year, I walk one or the other of the two roads, always accompanied by dogs, and occasionally with my wonderful neighbors. Despite our introverted natures, we have developed a sense of community and rely on each other for those moments in life when we need community. 

This morning, before the light arrived, coyotes were yipping and howling in the woods that exist between my place and my neighbor’s. Stache the Cat, once a feral kitten and now the bully in the house, ran for cover in one of the bedrooms. My dog, Beau, jumped off the comfortable couch he had been napping on, went to the window, pointed his snout straight up, and joined in the howling. He had no choice. I listened, smiling, and pondered how that ancient instinct to howl with a pack was never domesticated out of existence—a moment of wildness. Like Beau and the coyotes, I experience a sense of wild contentment, living in the space between wildness and domestication. 

But is aging here the best choice? There is a fair amount of maintenance, the winters can be challenging, and 30 minutes from an emergency room can determine living or dying. I want to be realistic about the physical aspects of aging but don’t want to lose this place I call home - a place where I have a relationship with the land, neighbors and region. A place full of vivid memories and that wild contentment.

In the last decades of our life’s journey, many of us will likely move by choice, out of necessity, or both. What is your plan? Where would you like to spend your elder years? What, if any, options do you have? What does your place mean to you?

“Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.”—Gilda Radner