Home is an unpaved road

“Mom do you know how many signs there are to your house that say the road narrows?” This from my daughter on a drive to our Idaho home. I did not know. So I started at one end where our gravel road meets the highway and drove to the other end where it loops back to the highway. I found more signs than I am sharing, and many tree houses, too, along our route. For me, home is a sense of place, a sense of the wild in nature and in my life. I have lived in mountains, on a beach, almost on a boat, and in cities.

My feeling of home brings sounds of people chatting, laughing, and crying together. I smell aromas from family cooking together in our kitchens, the compost in gardens, and rotting seaweed on a beach. The sense of home would make a challenging photo series. Some feelings can’t be photographed.

I see me in a place remote from city sirens and helicopters, a place where I encounter wildlife and rocks and rivers and can walk daily in peace. I want to get off the pavement and journey up a dirt road, ever narrowing, to a home where I can retreat from the fast pace of life. A place to renew myself and my family and set us running back to pavement when the time is right.

The journey home begins where the pavement ends.

Turn off the gravel county road and visit me in the house on the hill with the green roof.