Land of my Sojourn

       A green Christmas works for me, at least. More than just the snow and ice, I needed to thaw out the tensions locked up in my emotional veins. Fresh air seemed just the medicine, so it was time for a hike with the boys, this day after Christmas.
       The cornfield, bared of all but stubble, was full of tracks, before we added our own. Following the fence line, pausing to hear the small cataracts reawakened in the creek as run-off has brought it a temporary resurrection, the sky was medium blue, with a high angel-white crescent moon, not yet lit. It was 3:30 before we set out, and dusk begins about an hour later, this time of year. Some areas of lower ground we could avoid, but we also trekked through 3-inch deep marsh, several times.
       The boys wanted to go to the high meadow by the woods, and this time they went all the way to the far end. Breaking out into the beginning of it, something in Jonathan emboldened him to go beyond the familiar. He took advantage of a pause Landon and I had made to take in the vista spread out below, and springing off on madly pumping legs yelled, "Further up, and further in, to Narniaaaaaa!" Landon caught him up and they continued as I maintained a stately, Rowan dryad pace. Which is to say, I lagged, but intentionally. There was a rock just big enough to sit on, which held traces of something like abalone in several tiny craters. Birches edged the woods at this far end of the meadow; I had never known or remembered from childhood any of that variety there. The air was temperate, mild enough that one with the remnants of a head cold could breathe in through the mouth without chilling the lungs.
        We explored the hedgerow, with its typical line of stones deposited from annual plowings and rock pickings, and by the time we had exhausted the border with our neighbor, the moon was just lit, and a bit of magenta had crept into the edge of the sky bowl. When we were back down to the road again, my brother was driving by tractor lights, and it was time for me to head to the barn to care for my goats.
         Walking land is therapy for me. I have been on a treadmill for exercise, and walked roads for that purpose, too. But the mental quiet I seek comes in when I strike out cross country. I have tried to pin down why that is. I think it where things grow, where life resurrects over and over again, that God is most present to me. Smelling earth, or even snow, hearing water, feeling grass and other textures, affects me. I am not a self-styled nature lover for the righteousness of it. As a farmer's daughter I think I somehow had the idea that nature is a wild one, that we fight to live, exactly because we came out of it. At times of life, and in certain ages of earth, it is as much of nature that remains in us, as keeps us human. I suppose this is why, as people have "left the land" we are less and less inclined to stewardship of anything.
          I have lived on and from the land all my life, and now that I find myself in the no-man's-land of divorce where no water springs and no green refreshes, I am especially needing to be here on the land of my childhood, where I first learned to figure things out, and who I was and how to stay true to her.