Revisiting a Wild Place

I spent the last week and a half in California, visiting my moms and spending time where I grew up. And along with lots and lots of talking, watching the Tiny documentary on Netflix, showing my mom my possible floor plans, and eating at every restaurant we could think to visit, we drove out to where we lived until I was 16.

The house I grew up in is gone. It was a single wide mobile home and falling apart by the time we moved to town. In its place, the new owners of the land have built a giant house. Nearly a McMansion, though a very lovely one from the outside. They've done very nice things with the land, a new pasture in place of the old one, and it is good to see the place being taken care of.

But we didn't drive up and knock on the door to go looking. Instead, we went down the road and I visited my wild place. So the picture up there is two months and 30 years after the last one I posted. The road's a bit closer to the tree, the trunk's a bit wider...but then so am I!

It was an incredible visit, to get to share these plans I'm making with my mother, to hear them come out ever more real as I described the research I've done, the decisions I've made, the steps I'm taking.

And it was incredible to again sit where I had as a four-year-old girl, breathing that air, listening to the glorious silence of the country, and know I'm doing what I can to reclaim the same sense of possibility I had then.