Sanctuary

Over the winter months we rise in the dim dawn and sit together in the living room. No lights, across from each other, coffee in hand. Often we don’t talk. We each greet the day in our fashion, let the gray light creep into the sky. Feel the house around us, seventy years old, a stolid little block of a structure which, over the decades, we have transformed, bit by bit, to our liking. Where all three of our kids were born and grew into who they have become. Surrounded by our pictures and art, our books and maps, our precious rocks and artifacts, the urns with ashes of our parents. Sometimes we discuss the day, or our concerns and discoveries, more often we let the early silence be.

In the summer, once the snow melts and the grass greens and the flowers burst out with color. When the lilacs send their fragrance into the air. When western tanager and lazuli bunting visit, we are drawn outside in the early brightness. We sit in our chosen spots – a chair at the top of the back steps under the lilac branches, or a seat by the fire ring under the old green ash, or on a decrepit old metal lawn chair set hidden in the aspen grove we planted nearly 30 years ago. There, back near the bowling alley parking lot, two blocks from the cacophony of Main Street, we are surrounded and buffered. The leaves rustle in the first breezes of the day. The walkway we made from scavenged railroad plates, now covered by a soft carpet of creeping thyme, the bird bath Sawyer made in a ceramics class, the stone arch adorned with agates and petrified wood. Where chickadees hop in the branches, bight and attentive.

There, with the hum of a highway in the distance, an airplane heading for the airport overhead, the thunder of a passing train half a mile away, with the press of growth and money and greed and distraction more insistent every season; we sit, coffee in hand, and let the peace of this rectangle of space embrace us – its history, its hard work, its stubborn will to flourish, its memories.

We talk, often, of how to move on, whether to stay, bemoan the changes happening inexorably around us. More and more it feels like a defensive space, a place to retreat to from what our town is becoming. And yet, every morning, winter and summer, greeting each day, it is sanctuary and peace and the satisfaction of our lives here, year on year, all that has happened. Our place.

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