Having grown up in one home from age three to twenty-one, married life was a change—with adjustments to many moves. I learned to endure, but also discovered what made me happy.
At home, I did my school work at an old-fashioned desk, next to a north-facing window where I watched birds from my neighbor’s feeder come to mine. That was the beginning of my later awareness that they were my family. Here at Meherabad, I live apart from densely-populated neighborhoods, having on my one-eighth acre, fifteen trees and a pedestal bird bath that the birds enjoy, shaded by a neem tree outside my kitchen sink window.
At my grandparents’ farm, with hair not allowed down the drain, I washed mine in the open door of a shed. Careful for splinters, I curled my bare toes over the rough, wooden board and poured on water, listening to its splashing in the tall grass. Having lived in suburbs and visited major cities, I prefer the country. Here, between my home and the road, I see herds moving across a broad expanse of short, dry grasses—for now undeveloped.
Before children, Paul and I bought a cottage on Cape Cod—with grey weathered shingles and its name, “Bayleaf,” carved on a quarterboard.* Halfway down a sand road, it faced a treed-lot the owner didn’t want to build on, and beyond the road’s end, a view of Swan River. Scraggly trees, a pine, sparse grass, and native bushes gave us privacy on a double lot. Inside was traditional, but for me the best was out back: a fenced shower where I washed my salty body and suit under stars.
Later, having a family home, we had a teak table with pale-striped papered-walls above white wainscoting. One window faced south and a double one looked west. Smiling for a celebration photo, our older daughter sat at the table set with water goblets around a centerpiece of a plum with a few flowers. After seven years of changing living places at Meherabad, each with a plastic table, when I built a home, I asked the carpenter for a small, round, wooden one—a treasure under my placemat.
My realization is, “For understood reasons, and possibly unconscious memories of other lives, certain aspects of home may remain with us or return.
*Decoratively carved wooden name boards, originally made for ships, now often found on houses on Cape Cod and other places in New England