It’s a funny thing about comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you.

~ Benjamin Button

~~~

He always told me that the freckles scattered across my legs and arms were worm holes, and I believed him.  After all, they did look suspiciously like the dark spots on the crab apples littering the ground beneath the trees in the lower field.  I worried about this, about when the worms got in, and how on earth they would ever get out. He teased me mercilessly on my summer visits, nabbing me as I ran through the room and trapping me between his legs – in what he called a bear trap – tickling me until I gasped for breath.

He was a woodsman, like his father before him.  I remember the softness of his worn flannel work shirts, the way the scent of the forest clung to his skin, and how his fingers seemed permanently stained with dirt and tractor grease.

He was somehow different from the rest of our noisy crew. He mostly held himself outside the fray, observing the chaos with quiet amusement, chewing on a bit of wheat or a tall piece of field grass plucked outside.  I had a sense, even as a young child, that he was far more comfortable in a quiet stand of trees than he would ever be in the midst of his highly social family.

Today word came, traveling as it does amongst family, from aunt to aunt to mother and finally to me.

You know how your uncle feels about gays and lesbians? He doesn’t think it is right at all.  Your aunt says it would be best if you didn’t come up to visit.

I’m still for a moment, blinking back surprise and sudden tears.  My throat is tight and I summon a bit of bravado that I don’t really feel.

Fine.  His loss.

Yes. My mother agrees quietly.

~~~

On my last visit home this was all just beginning to make its slow, painful ascent to the surface.  After six weeks of idyllic vacation I returned to the desert and within days the foundation gave way beneath my feet, beginning a free fall that lasted for almost two years.  I was nervous about coming home, about finding the courage to present myself to those who have known me since birth, and to stand without apology before them.

I’ve been here for two weeks, and it’s been so uneventful so far as to be anticlimactic.  I had an idea that my differences – that sense of otherness that has been my companion often on this journey - would be more profound here.  Instead it’s been elusive, so much so that I have to remind myself that anything has changed at all.

At home now, amongst the green and the water and the earth that seems infinitely more solid beneath my feet, I’m reduced to my essence.  All the rest swirls out of my grasp and all that’s left is me.

It’s a lesson in layers, in all that I carry with me by choice, all that I hold on to, to protect and comfort and make fierce.  All of that belongs in the desert, it seems.  It has no footing here by the sea.

Without all those labels and identities and protective spells wound tight around me, I am open and simplified.  My breaths are drawn deeper and I can allow the moments to steal over me and make me still. The drive to go-go-go eases up, and all that is left is to be.

From the nomadic childhood existence of a preacher’s daughter, I drew comfort in the eternal sameness of my summer home in the country, nestled along a rutted country road in a protected curve of the Bay of Fundy. No matter what happened elsewhere during the year, this place remained untouched.  It is only now, having changed more than I ever thought possible, that I realize the root of that comfort lies in the knowledge that I haven’t really changed at all.

The crashing waves and the green grass and the ancient trees will greet me and accept me as they always have.  The air, electric with the buzzing of thousands of insects, will touch my face and find that I am no different than I was before.  And when I raise my eyes upward at night in the darkness only found deep in the country, the thick blanket of stars will not wonder who I am. They’ve known me forever already.

Nothing changes, really.  Like the rocks on the beach, we are broken down, carried places, placed in new formations, but always, at the heart of it, exactly the same as we began.  Even if we don’t at first recognize ourselves, we still belong, still exist, are still a part of the same infinite whole.

~~~

His loss?

Not really.  Our loss.  All of us.  His and mine and theirs and yours.

Don’t you see? I want to scream. Don’t you understand? I’m the same girl I was then.

Worm holes and all.

Written by: Jeanette on Thursday | 06.25.09.