Where Did They Get So Many Snowshoes?

There is a house inside my heart.  I lived there once.  Now I visit on occasion.  It was bought by Cracker Barrel. They make food and sell nostalgic paraphernalia.  On long road trips, I venture in for an "old fashioned" stack of pancakes, the kind I used to make when I lived there full time.

They're ok.

I used to have a garden outside the house, when it was still mine.  Fairies rode dragonflies and hid in the purple bells of foxglove blossoms when summer thunderstorms blew through.  Morels popped out of the ground on Saturday mornings and I would fry them in sweet butter for my friends. 

One day I woke up and I was standing on the side of the highway, looking at a wooden facade with US army rocking chairs forced on the front porch.  My fairy garden had disappeared and there was a jar of overpriced rock candy where I once kept my bluejay feathers. 

I tried to keep living there, but it's hard.  I am a little uncomfortable with the decor.  Old rifles mounted beneath the shabby heads of small deer, black and white portraits of unsmiling strangers, a rolling pin, six or seven pairs of venerable snowshoes, browning macrame patterns set in circular frames.  These walls are overwhelming.  I feel like a tourist.  I retreat to the woods.

Do you ever have that feeling, the one when you are at the edge of something and want only to be part of it, but you can't break through the invisible skin separating you from yourself?

Here in the forest, I get crazy after a while.  I go mad, unzip myself and let my wildness jump into the trees.

This makes me hungry.  That's when I walk back toward the highway to visit the Cracker Barrel.  I'll have an honest-to-goodness homestyle meal.  I must admit, the food is getting better.  This morning they put morels in my special omelet.