“Feels like home to me
Feels like home to me
Feels like I'm all the way back where
I come from
Feels like home to me
Feels like home to me
Feels like I'm all the way back where I belong…”
Hiraeth: A Welsh word for a type of homesickness for who we were in the past; nostalgia of the times gone by; grief for losses of places that were, or were in our memories that are warped by such loss. It is a place I reside these days, as do many of those of us who are now ‘elderly’. It takes effort not to get maudlin. I am not a maudlin person. I still make magic where I can.
Even though my gazebo took a fatal dive, I have to ‘make pretty’, my outside space. It is the one space that is truly mine. Some women are queens of their kitchen. I have one tiny plot of land that I can call my very own and Il prettify it just because. I brought in pink shale gravel and raked it al myself. I got help by a family member to dump all my pots into a big wheelbarrow and I mixed and repotted my outside flower pots. I brought out outside decorations, made some new ones, and set twinkling lights aglow for during the night when I am wont to go out and check the outside world and get fresh air.
I realise I am still afraid of the dark and it shows when I am outside at night. We have had bear and cougar go right against the back of the house and around the gazebo, in the past, so I am a little wary. I love night lights and love to go out in the still of the night and listen for the occasional call of an owl. It is comforting to me to be out there,
In the late spring and summer, and into fall, I love to be out under the gazebo, where I set up my art studio, and this year, to go outside and see the gazebo all bent and fallen down, breaks my heart, in a way. And so, until we decide on a way to redo the gazebo, I make pretty what I can and focus only on the pretty and not the rest. I have always done this. I a my mother’s daughter in wanting lots of flowers and a pretty backyard. As I said, it is the only ‘mine’ place. All else is someone else’s house and decorations, so this is me staking my claim on a small area in the back of the house where I spend a great deal of time.
I long for the rock gardens of Maine. I long for my mother’s acre of garden flowers with all the flowers starting with the tallest marigold down to the silver sage towards the front. Her garden was notorious and the first thing others saw when they entered our town around the curve in the road. That yard held my secrets in the tall cottonwood trees whose limbs I knew by heart. And in the back of the yard, my father’s garden, neatly planted in rows, with little channels of water that he fed water from a ditch he had dug. And, at the edge of the garden were the clutch of willows that made a secret hidden place for a little girl to go out and make hers. Perhaps being adopted had me find and make secret private places home to me.
Hiraeth; spaces and places I can never go back to nor can I recreate those spaces exactly. But those memories drive me to create what I can so that it feels like home. I can sit out on the swing, or take my coffee out to the beautiful table we have out under a canopy and just be.
Is there Hiraeth in your life?
©Carol Desjarlais 4.16.22
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