Maybe I’m a Recluse

When I pull back onto your farm after a wonderful evening with good people talking about good things and feel a sigh of relief and pleasure so intense that I almost cry, it becomes time to question whether I might be a bit of a recluse. 

This week, I have left the farm once for an afternoon/evening. . . and when I came back, all I could think was, “Finally, I’m home.”

This feeling is a response to who I know myself to be – a true introvert.

But it’s also, in part, a response to my deep and growing love for this place – for the way the dry stream bed makes a gate to the land, for the Boston ferns on the porch, for the quiet crunch of gravel as I pull to the back door.

This place is my sanctuary. Green with a year’s worth of rain in a handful of months and tunneled with rabbit trails carved by the bounding feet of Stephen, Suzy, and Sophie, our resident bunnies.  The entrance to Pete the groundhog’s hole that Philip has begun mowing. The trail that I want to walk zigzagged because that is how it will be when it is our driveway for the lodge.

I am beginning to know – finally – what Dillard and L’Engle describe in their spaces. The face of each rock and the grip of each life.

When I return to this place, the world is so huge, bigger than the one I drive out of in some sense each time I turn across the bridge and head up the mountain.To feel the pretenses and poseur that I require out in the world slip away down into the pasture and out the springs that bubble there. To envision how much this place speaks and lives my dreams and how it will become more and more the dream of Philip and I. To imagine the place full of people – at the wedding, at workshops, at concerts, at retreats.

So perhaps it is that I am a recluse, a bit. But maybe it’s more just that I know what it is to come home.