I’m not the same moved person who moved here to Portland. I’ve never loved a home as much as this and the reasons are not entirely about the home itself. It is the garden. It is the commitment to our neighbors, it is the pleasure I find in the birds and animals who make their homes here.
It is love of Place.
I don’t think it matters where you put down your roots, home is where you commit to loving the rituals of the season and whoever shares them with you.
When I see red leaves blown across the patch of orange pumpkins, I know autumn is coming. The first time I help the tendrils of a sweet pea find a trellis, I say: this is a Portland spring, a slightly softer bite in the wind, racing clouds in the sky and an unreliable sun. When there are baskets of red raspberries and blueberries, I feel the hot sun of my back and say: this is summer, fruit and sunflowers, basil and sweet corn. When I cover the dirt with blankets of clover, I say this is winter. The branches are hard and bare and chickadees need extra suet and black-oiled sunflower seed.
These tender duties to a small patch of ground: to the people, animals, and plants who live here have changed everything.
We’ve had a long warm and dry summer in Portland and it was good for the hot weather plants. My home is chock full of pumpkins—rouge vif’d’etampe—or otherwise called the Cinderella pumpkin. A tidbit of fun is that the fairy tale, Cinderella, was written by a Frenchman named Charles Perrault who wrote the story in 1697. He conceived of the carriage for Cinderella as a coach like the pumpkins that grew where he lived with their high lobes and graceful shape. Knowing this has made my delight greater as I watched the pumpkins deepen in color and take on their iconic shape.
What brings this pleasure? It surely must be what makes life worth living. Sometimes the simplest things yield the greatest happiness. Here are mine:
Going out in the morning to pick flowers for a bouquet.
Feeling the slight weight of my guitar pick, fingering the tools of the trade; the capo, the strap, the gig bag, the warm wood of the guitar, even the recalcitrant wiggling of new strings, tough to keep in tune.
Then there is dense cotton paper from Italy with ragged edges reminiscent of a time when people used was to seal their personal correspondence. The smell of the wax. The beauty of hearing Italian spoken well, and French spoken well. The way my husband smells after a shower, as though he had lemons on his fuzzy chest—a place where I lose myself. The smell of a fire in the fireplace. The clean and sweet head of a new baby and the powdery smell of that baby as she yawns and falls asleep in your arms. Her jammies all clean and fresh.
This is just a start.
This is why I live.
I’ve asked people why they live and to my great surprise, some didn’t know. I don’t comprehend that answer. But I believe that everyone—at some time—will feel the warm sand between their toes, or dance a step that just works or have somebody love you like you’ve never been loved……and it will bubble up from somewhere: this is my reason. And when that happens, is there anything more?
So, for today, here is my reason in pixels. You can barely see my arm holding the bouquet before bringing it inside. But isn’t it perfect just as it is? No arranging necessary.
What do you love?
