Rituals of Home

As many of you know, it is hard on any given day to know where either Herb or I are, so I should, for the sake of clarity, let you know that as I began this, we were both in the apartment in MA. [For the sake of full disclosure, I am now in Vermont.]   Our cat, Simon (the black one), is lying on the back of the couch with his spine against my shoulder. It's his way of welcoming me home from my travels. He is in physical contact, but won't face me, giving him plausible deniability in case anyone passing should think that he really cared. He is, after all, a cat.

Ed (the other cat, not the husband), was here a moment ago, looking to share in the ice cream ritual that I inherited from my mother. He has become a true Rubinstein even though his contact with my mother has been limited.

My mother still has ice cream before bed each night--vanilla is the preferred flavor these days. I remember her telling us of a recurring dream in which she was driving a car (gods forfend !!), and couldn't figure out how to make it stop. "Call Sam (my father)!", she shouted, and the car ran into the wall of a building which turned out to be an ice cream factory. She had to eat her way out.

I remember (vaguely) waking my brother in the middle of the night when we were kids (sometimes he woke me first), and taking turns walking out into the living room in our jammies, whining "I can't sleep!" while pretending to rub ostensibly sleep-deprived eyes with a tiny fist. Five minutes later, the other sibling would arrive on the scene with a similar complaint, and "of course!", the only possible resolution was ice cream ordered from some neighborhood store that would deliver pints of Hagen Dazs--coffee for us, and cherry vanilla for my dad. Mom ate most any flavor as I remember, and would finish any ice cream that was left in our dishes. We would argue over who got "the duck" which was the top layer of ice cream in the pint, shaped by the contact of the lid with the contents. Somehow that was the best tasting part.

Like most family stories, this tale may be apocryphal, but it is one of the links to childhood that endures many decades later. It has emerged in the last few months as a reminder of things that shaped me in long forgotten ways.  I have been thinking about rituals a lot lately, especially as so many of mine appear to be breached by travel. But traveling back and forth between MA and VT and NYC has evoked memories of summer weekends in the car to and from the beach. We went to the same strip of sand every summer from the time I turned one, to when I was old enough to be living on my own. We pulled the little red wagon from the boat dock to the house and chained it in the same place at the ferry dock when we returned at the end of the weekend.

Every Friday night, my father would cut carrots and celery into sticks, my mother would make her "glop" with some assembling of mayonnaise or cottage cheese or yogurt and ketchup, and we would eat hot dogs and burgers on the grill. On Saturday, we had my father's char-broiled steak made according to a ritual that lasted decades: the coals in a pyramid toward the middle of the grill, the lighter fluid allowed to soak for 30 seconds, the flame starting toward the back and 20 minutes of burning to embers before the steak was set to cook. Of course, we walked into town for a movie and an ice cream cone each weekend, at least once.

It seemed normal then, the hour and a half trip to the beach, the half hour ferry ride, the ten minute walk to the house with the suitcase-loaded wagon, each Friday night. It seemed normal then, to wake when we returned to New York, under the yellow street lamps at the park, before we were carried half sleeping from the back of the car to the apartment I had known all my life. It seemed normal to take long drives in the country to a restaurant and to places that probably formed some liminal memory of rural locales that has imprinted me into adulthood.

It seems less normal now.

Maybe it is that I am the one taking on the burden of packing and unpacking; maybe it is that I am often traveling alone. Maybe it is that when I arrive in MA or NYC, I don't feel that I am at home.

Though many of those trips are to the same apartment I grew up in, though many of those trips are to the same place where the banging of the steam heat in the radiators was the music that I slept to; though many of those trips are to the apartment with the same green walls and the same green and white kitchen, and the same nighttime view over the park, I am increasingly feeling the distance grow from a place that will never again be my home. When Mom leaves the apartment for the last time, I will spend some weeks packing the boxes of papers and books and deciding where the furniture will go. After all, she has only rented that apartment, the one that patterned our family for more than 65 years, and the landlord will want it back...quickly.

I will probably close the house in Fire Island as well. I will pack up the furniture and the linens and ship them to Vermont. I will pack up the hibachi that my Dad used to make those steaks, and the bowl my mother used for her glop.  I will sweep the sand from the floors into a little bottle that I will carry with me; I will add some ocean water and seaweed and perhaps a few shells.

In New York, I will say goodbye to the doormen; Joe, who wore a blue wool coat every day even in the heat of a New York summer, has been replaced by Umberto, and Mike by Cirillo, but these men started and ended my days--in reality or in my imagination, even when I no longer considered this my home.

I haven't planned what I will do on that last night in New York, but there was one ritual that would have probably been part of that last night in New York. One of my strongest memories of childhood, as strong as waking under yellow lights, is of walking on the cobblestones of Washington Square Mews, a street that once ran beside the 19th century carriage houses that served the brownstones on Washington Square Park.

 I remember pulling away from my mother's hand,  so that I could walk on those uneven pavers, and feel their wobbles under foot.

I understand that the recently completed renovation of that street that ran between one and two story square brick and stucco structures, has resulted in a smooth paved surface. 

I wonder, once the apartment door has closed for the last time, once the hibachi is packed and gone, what will remain of the rituals that shaped me. If I have not lived in New York for more than a decade, in that apartment for more than three, I could always check back in; insert myself for a moment in the familiar. The view outside the apartment in New York is unchanging, over the Park and to the Empire State Building. New architecture is like some decision to repaint the walls or move the cabinets; it doesn't fundamentally change what we see or know. But that view is about to belong to someone else, and I will be a passing tourist in the place I learned to walk. And I suspect that over time, the surface of my memory will be smoothed like those cobbles.

I once believed that I could never find a home because I was tugged between place and passages, but there was always that view, and the sand. I grew up with passages between landscapes as different as it was possible to be, but those landscapes were burnished in celery and carrots on Friday nights, and ice cream before bed. They were both the canon and the apocrypha.

Now the canon of childhood will be gone, leaving only the apocrypha.

I have lived a life that is rare these days-- a life where the places of my childhood autobiography, remained intact long into an adult life lived away. Perhaps I am feeling for the first time, a kind of homesickness, not for the place itself, but for the taste of ice cream before bed, and the feel of the sand and cobbles under foot, and what that meant in a world of change.

Vermont is a place of ancient stone walls that have survived change. Perhaps I will repair the walls that remain from the past. Perhaps I will start a new one, one rough stone at a time.

{Note:  This post has languished for many weeks, unposted. I have not felt that the ending was the one I wanted. Then, this morning, I realized, the ending is not yet written. I suspect there will be a sequel.]

An Event-Full Weekend

Our college always has its commencement events on Memorial Day weekend.  That's much later than most other schools, and has something to do with the way that we configure studio-based education.  The last class ended on May 12th, but those who are graduating have significant work to do before they can don their regalia.  Students completing theses must finish a 100-page or so book on their project that will live in the library as a cumulative record of the strongest work in the school; and we put up a commendation exhibit in the gallery, with all of the projects that were commended for degree project (undergrad) and thesis recognition.  So the book and the gallery require students to finish their work to a high polish once classes end.

It's also portfolio week.  Three times per year, some of our students are completing either the first or second segments of their three-segment curriculum, and must submit a portfolio as justification for admission into the next segment.  These are serious events — on average, about 60% of our undergraduates pass a portfolio review on their first attempt, about 75% of master's students.  We have a small number of portfolios to do in May, about 40; the July and the January reviews are much larger, a hundred or more books submitted at a time.

So today is the beginning of Commencement, with our Honors and Awards ceremony tonight.  It's a full-scale event; when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, the awards ceremony took place with just the recipients and the Chair of the School of Architecture out in one of the courtyards behind Wurster Hall.  But here, we have light catering and music and lots of families; it's a fun evening.

Tomorrow, commencement itself, beginning with the march of faculty and students led by a New Orleans brass band, down Newbury Street five blocks to Boston's Old South Church.  One hundred seven graduates this year, plus five honorary degrees (including a Doctor of Humane Letters to Ada Louise Huxtable, who won't be able to be with us for the ceremony itself but who is planning to come to tonight's smaller Honors and Awards.  Let's hear it for civilians who write intelligent things about architecture!!!  We need a LOT more of that.)

Then, in the afternoon after parents hands have been shook and students hugged, I get my reward; a drive to Vermont to be with my honey for the remainder of Memorial Day weekend.  We'll have lots of folks on the lawn Sunday afternoon to watch the town parade roll by, a shaggy but pleasant assortment of fire trucks and ambulances, tractors, ATVs, a high school band or two, dogs, bicycles, and whoever else gets into line.  And that evening, we'll all head over to the first big town potluck of the year, which runs from five or so until well after dark. 

We've been lucky on weather with both BAC graduation and with Middletown Springs Memorial Day ever since I've participated in either — it's far more likely to be sweltering heat than to be rainy.  And the early forecast for rain in Boston on Saturday is now being declared unlikely, but rain is possible in VT on Sunday.  If that happens, the parade may be endangered, but the potluck will just move indoors.

Ceremonies like these bring communities together in ways that are sometimes overly formal and sometimes a little hokey, but together nonetheless.  And they extend our communities a little, too; we add parents and kids and friends to the college family, we invite fire trucks from Granville and Poultney to be honorary Middletonians for the afternoon.  We both enclose and expand the circles, and celebrate the intersections that make all of our communities richer.

Productive? Depends on how you define productive...

The last time I moved (three years ago, from one end of Medford to another), I hired two men to load the U-Haul truck.  Good movers are amazing—they never stop moving, they understand exactly what shape everything is and where it can go, and they get big unarticulated solids (like a 7' tall, 4' wide one-piece oak bookcase) to go up stairs and around corners.

In comparison to that, Nora and I aren't being so productive today.  We drove north yesterday afternoon, partly to say that we'd made progress on packing, but partly so we wouldn't have to inhabit the same couch and wastebasket full of tissues for another day.

We got in last night around 6, packed a couple of things, had dinner, and Nora fell asleep while I was reading to her.  This morning, we were up about 7:45, puttered around some, went to the dump and the post office and the library.  We took oddly delicate things (birds' nests, wasps' nests, and so on) down off the living room beams and Nora packed those away.  She continued to fill and tape some boxes while I did some analysis on a data set I'd built for some colleagues;  I sent that report back to Boston and carried Nora's packed boxes out into the garage while she talked on the phone to a friend.   She laid down after a coughing spell while I replied to e-mails from some participants in last week's writing retreat, and she's now packing wicker and straw baskets while I write to you.

Perhaps if we muster the energy, we'll play a few hands of whist later in the afternoon before tea.

It's like living in a sanatorium, taking in the recuperative airs.  And that feels enormously productive.  We're appreciating each other, taking turns being solicitous of one another's aches, and allowing ourselves to be unpressured.  It's a rare gift, unpressured-ness, one that we often throw away to grab just a little bit more pressure.  We believe in Aesop's story about the ants and the grasshopper, and like him, believe that the happy grasshopper brought about his own deserved demise by not grinding endlessly away through the summer.  Joy is suspect, effort is granted unreflective approval.

Americans take less vacation than other Western countries, provide fewer services to our fellow citizens, have greater income disparities and more stagnant workers' wages.  On every objective measure, this endless pouring of ourselves into work is not helpful (except to a handful of people who reap all of the benefits of our manic over-investment).

Gosh, that paragraph was hard... and Etta James just came on the radio.  I think I'll take a break.

Nora wrote not long ago about a piece by someone she knows, who talked about the addiction to work.  That writer used the term carefully, having herself had other kinds of addiction issues.  But she urged us to think carefully about why we work.  Are we getting what we really want, or what we're supposed to want?  Are we repeating old patterns of avoiding other problems, other family members, our own dissatisfactions?  And, she notes, someone always profits from our addictions.  The drug dealers and international brokers, the cigarette manufacturers, the distillers, the state lottery — their existence relies on misery.  Who, she asks, profits from our addictions to work?

I have a second-hand acquaintance who worked as a USPS mail handler.  He sucked up all the overtime he could, working 60 and 70 hour weeks on a regular basis.  The time-and-a-half was a good deal.  But his friends at the post office laughed at him.  "The last two years of overtime is what bought me that boat!" he protested.  And they laughed again, and asked how often he'd had that boat out this year... well, not so much, of course, because he was amassing more overtime.

The American workforce has moved into salaried positions in a huge way in the past thirty years, and at least some of that is because salaried pay dissolves the expectation of the forty-hour workweek.  Someone profits from our over-investments in our work.  Is it us?

Positions of the hands

It is early evening and H and I are in Medford at the apartment. I have been sick for the past two weeks with what we believe to be whooping cough. I have made two visits to emergency rooms and two visits to doctors. H has made meals and brought tissues by the wagon load. He has stroked my back as I coughed, and coughed, and coughed. But H and I are still vertical at the end of the day. 

H arrived home about 5:30, greeted our neighbor, Beth, from across the street, as she went to get something from her husband Bill’s truck. Herb and I sat down on the couch and began reviewing a tense workday. A police car, another, a fire engine, an ambulance arrived at the doorstep. Beth came out of the house at a slow run with her head in her hands. Her daughters came out too. Heads in hands. Hands over their mouths. Steve, who is planning to marry Beth and Bill’s daughter in October, at the house, came out from the back. I think he walked a ways down the street beside the purpling rhododendrons, but he sort of blended in with all the men that kept spilling out of the cars parked at the curb.

The firemen disappeared around the back of the house. The paramedics disappeared around the back of the house. The cops disappeared around the back of the house. Then they walked in the front door, and out again onto the sidewalk. They seemed both aimless and purposeful at the same time. One took his raincoat out of the trunk of a police car. The paramedics weren't at the back of the house for long. I wanted them to go back in. I wanted to see the equipment in their hands, or at least carried on a different shoulder. I wanted to see their shirts wrinkled. Two of them came out scuffing their feet in the puddles of rain, as though they were trying to clean something off the soles of their shoes. It's odd what you see when your attention is so focused. Everything seemed to be in slow motion.

I have talked for as long as I have had breath about neighbors. About our beloved Vermont community. But there are communities and neighbors elsewhere as well. And Phyllis and her daughter Patty who live next door to us, came out on the street; Lori who lives on the other side of us was already there. I noticed how her long gray hair was lovely, the sides pulled back in a little curling ponytail. There were people I didn't know. We milled about, and watched. There was, of course, nothing to be done. Lori reviewed the fire that had burned down the tiny house across the street ten years ago. Phyllis shook her head slowly from side to side. The last time I saw her, she had told me she was praying for my mother. She held her hands together as if in prayer. Everyone's arms were crossed as though otherwise, they wouldn't know what to do with them. There wasn't anything for our hands to do.  I think Herb dug his hands into the pockets of his orange coat.

Herb said it was good that he had driven up to the house before the array of vehicles at the door. If he'd seen that array as he was driving in, he would have imagined something still closer. He imagined it yesterday when he couldn't reach me by phone, and got calls from two other friends who hadn't been able to reach me. He raced back to the house from work, expecting to find me in some state that wasn't amenable to care...or only to care of a sort that none of us want to contemplate.

Across the street, the paramedics and firemen were leaving. The policeman with the raincoat brought out a roll of yellow tape. We all know that tape by seeing it strung on fence posts and waving in a dirty breeze. I never expected to see it go up. Not here. Not now. 

It had been a few days since I saw our neighbor Bill replacing the window in his house. We waved. It was on Easter Sunday that I spoke with him about having locked my keys inside the apartment. He was off in his truck to get some groceries for an Easter meal. Some time between those two visits, I told him that we would welcome him for a visit to Vermont. "Say hello for me, to every tree. Every tree."

Bill was the heart of the neighborhood. Bill could be relied on for repairs and a friendly word. Bill moved his parked truck to make room for my car, when the snow was piled higher than we could throw it. In Boston, that is an act of pure chivalry. 

I didn’t know Bill well. I don’t know his last name. I know his dog who never much liked me, and she let me know that, with the bravado of a Boston Terrier. She was hit by a car when they were walking recently, and now she is limping. I knew his daughter’s dog, Jack, who was adopted from a local pound a year or two ago. Jack is gregarious, and a lot like Bill.

There aren't any big messages here. Our friend Ursula says that brilliant writing is useful, not just beautiful. I can think of nothing useful in a man of barely 50 alive as I sat on a couch facing his house... and then gone, as I sat on the couch facing his house. Except that it makes me remember how lucky I am. And it makes me hold the ones I love close.

The San Francisco columnist Mark Morford wrote recently about the importance of giving thanks for all the things that go right in a rather twisted world.

Be cynical if you want. Be jaded and sneery and think the world is a razor blade of anger and pain, just waiting to slash you across the heart. This is your choice.

But the fact is, a thousand things go right for you every day. From the moment you wake up, the universe aligns in countless miraculous ways to make your life happen fluidly, effortlessly, incredibly. Your heart is working, your systems function, you do not instantly collapse, lose a limb or spontaneously combust. Amazing.

The car starts. The elevator works. Your legs transport you rather beautifully, hither and yon. The coffee is hot. The food placed before you is all kinds of stunning in how it connects you to the world. There's sunlight. Your eyes receive that light and create everything in existence. Also, trees! Nice....

You gotta give thanks. Not just for the big things, but for everything. All the time. Like breath. ...You can even whisper it under your breath, every time you notice something working right, no matter how seemingly mundane. The stapler worked. Your bed was warm. Your lover responded to your touch. The dog still likes you. Cool. Thank you.

Herb went outside. It is impossible to ignore when the cops have closed off the street and there is yellow tape on the fence. He came back in. We stood around trying to find something to do with our hands, and saying thank you for each breath..

Rest in peace Bill.  The trees will miss you, but I will say hello.

History, Rurality, and Masculinity

(Don't worry if that sounds like a dissertation title from the cultural geography program at the University of Surrey.  It's just my normal habit of putting together things that don't usually go together.)

Part 1.  Two posts ago, Nora outlined some of the cultural events that were swirling around America at the time that our home was built.  This house has been on its site for over 170 years.  I always thought that one of my criteria, if I ever hired an architect to design for me, would be that my house would be in the National Register of Historic Places in 300 years—and this house has the bones to do that.

But it's not the Great Pyramid of Giza, where you just put it up and then leave it alone for a few millenia.  It needs some attention now and then.  And that gets me a little worried.

Part 2.  James Howard Kuntzler wrote an influential book 25 years ago called The Geography of Nowhere, in which he makes the argument that a combination of personal mobility, economic centralization, and auto-based urban planning has reduced the ability for the human landscape of any part of America to look fundamentally different than any other part.  And a drive through Vermont Route 7 in Rutland proves his point.  Shopping centers, auto dealerships, gas stations, McDonalds and Panera and Dunkin Donuts — there's a three-mile strip there that exactly replicates three-mile strips of North Carolina and Michigan and Massachusetts.  It's an easy and incontrovertable argument to make, which is why Kuntzler's book is so useful; you smack your forehead and say "I've seen that a million times, and now he's told me why!"

But there's a smaller argument in there that has stuck with me for the twenty years since I first read the book.  Kuntzler argues that Home Depot and its ilk have supplanted not just the local hardware store but something larger, some sense that hardware has dignity and places some burden of talent and experience on those who employ it.  Do-it-yourself home repair, he says plays into two "contemporary myths: (1) the idea that shopping is a substitute for design, and (2) the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing, in this case skillful work without skill.”  The results of our acceptance of those myths has become a residential landscape which is shoddy and poorly conceived.

Part 3.  We romanticize farms and rustic cabins.  The groomed plants, the red barns and white houses, the open porch that allows the call to the farmhands for lunch.  But farms aren't really like that, and rarely have ever been.

Farms are expedient places.  Everyone has too much work to do, and so everything is done "good enough for now."  Tools are cheap and time is expensive, and most farms, even small family farms, look like muddy graveyards of industrial equipment.

As a result, one of the defining characteristics of men in small communities is that they fix things.  Keeping a thirty-year-old Deere skid loader running by virtue of chewing gum, baling wire and ingenuity is a mark of honor.

1 + 2 + 3.  This whole line of thought has come about because I'm attempting to design a pool cue rack for what will eventually become my secular temple after we move in.  My pool room will be a place of calmness and craft, a place where the ability to do things with care is the real reason for its existence and pool is the medium through which care can be expressed.  (This is utterly unlike being a college administrator, which is why I need it so badly.  Colleges have much in common with farms: if you get behind the catalog photos of Georgian buildings and attractive students reading on the lawn, you see beleaguered people building expedient outcomes, good enough for now.)

Something as simple as a cue rack takes on importance in a place like this.  The cues themselves are gorgeous and elegant, and the rack should be so as well.  I have some ideas for a very "simple" design, something that can fall to the background and not be noticed until you happen to notice it, and then it captures your attention as a small gift of its own.

I'm not sure that I have the manual skill to pull it off.  I could build an approximation, but it would be just that; an attempt, a mock-up, good enough.  But I know what I want.

The house has been attended to, for the past twelve years, by a remarkably talented craft builder in our community, one of a large fraternity of Middletown builders.  It is filled with small moments like those I'm describing, details that don't call attention to themselves but which reward your eyes and mind when you happen to catch one.

The house has stood for 170 years, and bears its own history of expedient decisions, of construction that's good enough (and has proven to be good enough for a long time).  But the past few years of the house seem to have been related more to the 1890s than the 1990s; there's an expression of hand labor and manual decision making that has skipped the Home Depotization of America, bears little relationship to its rural neighbors, and yet isn't fussy.  It's a house that deserves responsibility.

It's funny how something as inconsequential as a pool cue rack can lead in so many directions.  I could get one at Sears in thirty minutes for thirty dollars, and no one would ever look at it and say that it was a bad idea.  But it isn't a good idea.  And I feel a strong need for good rather than good enough.

Homing in

It has been two weeks since we got the news that will make our lives radically different in the coming year. We introduced it yesterday through history. But there were few words about this momentous event itself, one sentence, a few phrases.

It has been two weeks since H and I began talking about a joint blog post that would introduce you to this news, a blog post that would share the thing that will change our lives for the foreseeable future.

But I have not known where to start. I have not had the words. Perhaps my husband does. Perhaps he will find them in the lined pages of a notebook he once used at work  Perhaps I will find them in a fountain pen with brown ink that belonged to my father. Perhaps they are in the hollow of a tree that a bird once used for a nest.

I do not have the words for something we have imagined but, speaking for myself, I never believed.

I do not have the words for that wish I made on countless stars.

How is it possible that when we have held something so close, and known it is so far away, an impossible distance away, how is it that when it is here, as close as in the hand, well maybe a bit farther than that,  how is it that there are no words for the place that is....home.

A place of breath sounds--my husband's and my own, and the cats.
A place of morning light through  kitchen windows and peepers at dusk.
A place of knowing that what one planted will come up in the Spring, and that there will be a Spring, and that one will be there, not "one" but we, that we will be there, that the cats will be there, and our friends.

And that they too will know this place, and that the bed will be shaped to meet them.

We will be merging our books, as we have merged our lives...and what better symbol of the tying of the proverbial knot, than the placing of books together?  Will we do it alphabetically? By genre? By happenstance? Will we place good "bedfellows together" so Terry Tempest Williams can speak with Grace Paley or Joe Coomer with Anne Michael? Marriage is the living together of books.

How is it possible that after uncounted years of paying others for the roof over one's head, the windows that keep one warm and keep one cool, that let one see out and let others see in; how is it possible that when the light falls, when it is not yet dark, but no longer day, those windows that permit reflection will be ours?

How is it possible that after uncounted years of paying others for the hearth on which to cook the food that nourishes, the food that fills the empty spaces, the food that joins friends together in laughter and yes, tears, how is it that that hearth will be our hearth, the place at which we welcome each other with candles and flowers from the garden, with bread and wine and honey and salt. In the Jewish tradition, bread is the stuff of life and salt the symbol of flavor and the emblem of tears, and honey, the marker of the sweet. "May you have flavor, and tears of sadness to illuminate the joy, and sweet at the end of day," I thought as I brought these gifts to others. Now I will place them on the table, our table, at my husband's plate, and at mine.

How is it that there will be the dust in the corners, the debris of forgotten parties? Our dust. And a forgotten dime. An earring. A shoelace.

How is it that we will know what it is to lie on the grass and smell the dirt, that we will shape it to our desire? And that we will watch the first snowfall. The first green leaf.

I imagine walking to each tree and greeting it. I imagine bringing plants from where I have lived and introducing them to those that grew up here.

I imagine bringing the ashes of my dogs, the one that lies now where I grew up, on a spit of land by the ocean, to lie beside the ashes of the dog that lived a short distance away, that died in the snow of early Spring. And both of them will bracket the boy-girl rabbit who was fierce and self-possessed and beautiful, and they will lie at peace together looking over the  town.

What is this thing, this longing to know that each day, when we rise from bed, we place our feet on our own floor, before all else; that when we draw water it comes from our own land, and when we drink, it is from our own well...

We "well up" with tears and with gratitude and with the belief that here, in this place, we will pass days and nights and days again, beside the road, beside the town, beside the mountains that rise to enclose us in a community we love.

We are coming home. At last. Here.