Coming home

“Wherever I live

                it is most beautiful.”

                                (from Japan)

These words from yesterday’s calendar page seem to summon perfectly what I felt after our drive north from the Calgary airport the night before last.

Three weeks in Germany, brim-full with wonderful encounters, time spent with family and friends in beautiful surroundings have come to a close. There is little time for contemplating when there is so much to take in – all this will come later, unfolding bit by bit during quiet hours spent weeding or harvesting in the garden.  

As usual, the flight was a time of transition for me, of gaining distance from what had been, not only physically but emotionally, suspended in a space all of its own, belonging neither to the past nor the future. I enjoy flying, even under the somewhat cramped conditions of the Air Transat airbus, possibly for that very reason. It’s almost like an emptying of the mind to let go of what has been and make myself ready for what comes next. 

We picked up our car at the Park2Go and were on our way by 6:30 p.m. The Rockies, so much closer in Calgary than they are at home, were only dimly visible in the west, but the late afternoon sun streamed in through the windows, and it was warmer than it had been in Germany for much of our visit.

I let my eyes wander over the expanse of fields stretching east and west, the grey band of highway ahead of us, and was suddenly struck by the emptiness, almost monotony, of the landscape. I remembered the tall trees, the narrow, winding roads, the profusion of wildflowers, the little creeks in the dreamy valleys of the Odenwald to which we had just said good-bye, and, with surprise, caught myself thinking, it is so much prettier there!  What makes me, with all my love for hills and forests, long to return to this whenever I’ve been away for any length of time?  I felt a bit like a stranger, the atmosphere of the plane ride still lingering.

After a little while, I fell asleep. When I woke up half an hour later the sun had slipped a bit lower, and colours had intensified in the changing light. The sweet honey smell of blooming canola fields filled the air, and I noticed how green it was. There had been ample rains in our absence, and wheat and barley were headed out. We had returned to full summer, to the promise of a bountiful harvest.

By the time we turned off the highway a few miles from home the sun was glowing red right above the horizon. Quiet ponds, ringed with tall reeds, reflected its light, families of ducks and geese hardly making a ripple in the water, groups of gulls flying homeward to their nightly gathering places on one or the other lake.

Driving down the last hill, seeing our house, the spruce trees along the driveway, the lawn, the red, orange and yellow nasturtiums in the barrel by the mailbox, catching a glimpse of blue, purple and red from the perennial bed at the front of the garden, I knew I had come home.