I come to the cabin that Catfish admitted he’d been sneaking off to all of Covid. The first time I come here it is to see him. We meet in the parking lot and by midwalk towards the other are hugging in heartbody steps before our actual bodies connect. It is near the anniversary of the first year of the virus, just under 50 degrees, a hazy white kind of sunny out and the pond is chilled but the cold not so damp that I need more than a flannel. He would come here to find the quiet needed to work on music. He’d come to get away. I am only the fourth person he has hugged since September.

That he’s been sneaking off to this place wows me. It is only a 45 minute entirely back road drive for me to get here. The second time I come, they are calling for 100% rain for the better part of the daylight hours beginning at 9 am. The forecast is off though and I am able to load my truck, and later the wagon to cart my stuff into the edge of the woods to the cabin, and sit on the porch in the silence of the cypress waters and bask a good long while in nothing but periodic drizzle. About dusk fall it really starts to come down, I shut the front door and heat water for nettle tea. I feel so tucked in.

I am grateful for the electricity here, and the warmth of heat, too. It is just the perfect amount of rustic grace with modernity. I admit that I am even grateful for the ability to connect my computer to my phone’s internet. These are not amenities, especially the internet that I ever indulge in when camping. But this is cabin time, a different phase and experience of solitude for me in my outdoor life that started with baby in the late summer, running out to the Blue Ridge as often as we could.

We started watching movies on VHS and DVD, spent sweet nights and long weekend days building fires indoors, cooking long crock pot meals or baking all afternoon. Today I heated water with a hot plate but felt drawn to write and here I have the hot spot of my phone while in the wooded elevation of VA not at all. And it works, in all these moments the simple quietudes, the softspeak of trees or rain or mist off creek bed, pond or ridgeline, the writing like today when the poetry traipses willingly around me, the afternoons reading or given totally to the making of food, stacking of wood. How it’s rooted me~Home. Not like, my direct little town. More, my enchantment with the fullness of my bioregion. The profound awareness of how grace, in form of mother nature’s pilgrimage places, has opened as naturally to me this year as when a path is meant to unfold. I start today’s time here with salt & offering ritual to live out loud my thanks, that I have the resources to explore, say yes, to come and go. To arrive, to be found. To the Timing this year. Of it all.

Over the weekend we were off to Susquehanna, we dropped money on BrandName TM hotels for both nights because we were in a mood of indulgence and sometimes he especially just needs this, I think, because he can. I love him with a softness that is so much bigger than me the purity of it heats my heart and slices my center open in awe. At the end of one of our hikes he is like, this is us, it is a tree that V’s at its great broad moss covered base to become two wondrous, separately sensuous tree bodies and the crescent moon is there just between the tops of them, dumping her power into their wild outstretched just moisted budding arms. It is dusk and we are between the Veils, it is Equinox and we are between the Veils. We found relics in an old dump site of 1800’s jars and pottery and other treasures, we had the right Offerings he said and he in fluid unison was also the first to say let’s build an Offering, and also let them know we’ll be back, and lord love isn’t dead, I almost died from the syncopation of it all, I am still mushy and romantic at heart.

It has been a long time since I’ve written soundly on love. We are anything but sound. We have vowed to the other our Madness though, and this feels like a good time, alone here without him, my own space, for 48 hours, only for me, to reflect on it all. Our words to the other in the windy Nor’Easter, 26 years since we met on the Pier. What home really, all those years I ran from it, means to me.

I am eager for tomorrow, long quiet hiking and then later, listening to the language of fire crackling, and for mother’s nature’s other messages and surprise sounds. The rain now is settling, it is still daylight enough for it to almost seem twilight purple edged along the treelines on the other side of the pond. These are good, are omens, in the air. I am grateful for the chance to come here.