A Remembrance of Things Present

This year more
than any other
has found me
with a
desire to be
no where else
but home.



The period from Thanksgiving to now has flown by unlike any time period that I can remember in recent history. My days have been really wonderful here at home with the children. While I enjoy the views looking out the windows, I am really enjoying my time within the walls of our home. There was a time when I was in my twenties and I was so busy. Busy with studies, with work, with life in general. I was on a mission then but at the time I didn't know what that mission was. The twenties are a strange time of trying to figure out the what and wheres of your life. I had a strong sense of who I was and what I held important, but I found I had so little time to just be in that life of the person waiting inside of me. I was a hunter gatherer from an early age. I collected things I wanted my future children to have. I would keep a box open in my office and drop little treasures into it as they made themselves known. Nothing extravagant or expensive, but something that pulled at my heartstrings. This may sound so odd for a twenty-something but I kept a box open for my later years as well. The things that went into it were for a time in my life when I would have an empty nest. Things such as old gardening books, and interesting yarns and textiles. A box would fill up, I'd seal it, and off it would go into storage. After about fifteen years of this squirreling away, I had quite a few boxes. There was a definite pattern emerging though, and I realized quite suddenly I was creating parts of my own childhood in those boxes. I was also creating a later life of people I admired. I noticed that certain themes kept coming up. Huge dinner plate variety peonies that my mother grew in my childhood home, the chartreuse green of my Nana's bedroom, nature oriented items that reminded me of my nanny Ellie's home, especially her chickens. I would find these things going about my normal days and there was never a plan, or even a conscious reason. But here I am, a mother of two, staying at home to raise them, out in the countryside, and I find that my boxes have intersected. When we moved to Hawk's Run, all those boxes came with us. I began putting things away that were hidden inside. It was a surreal experience. A set of very old fashioned paper nursery rhyme animals now grace my son's Christmas tree. My few but very special cookbooks I use almost daily. The yarns sit in my basket and have started to become actual things made for my children. The gardening books I read like a daily newspaper because there is so much wonder about the things I see growing here. The children's playroom is filled with toys I once played with as a child myself. None of this took a lot of money. Hardly any at all when I realize that each thing that went into the box was sought out in some strange Filofax manner in my head. There was an unwritten list and when the item was found at a next to nothing price, it came home. So now in my thirties I come to the realization I was on some sort of scavenger hunt that has become my life. I know there will come a time when a career calls me forth again, but for the next few years, my career is submerging my children in a life somewhat like I was shown by those who raised me. Perhaps the last month it has all come together. My children and I are in a pattern of living here at Hawk's Run. My husband, bless his heart, now can see that some of the nonsense in the boxes now makes sense. A remembrance of things past is now our present, and our future.