Lyndonville, Vermont ©Cathy de Moll
We buried my uncle on the perfect hill, overlooking the quintessential Pennsylvania valley - small, dark lanes below us, winding through a canopy of green that offers, rarely, a peek at the horizon. My mother had difficulty all week absorbing the news. “Something terrible has happened,” she would mutter, looking at the picture of her favorite brother tacked upon the wall. We would explain again the circumstances of his death and, at each recounting, she’d slowly shake her head. “Something terrible has happened,” she would say again as soon as we were quiet.
But when she stood under the wide oak branches her grandmother had planted so many years ago – shade and comfort for the family at its feet, clustered generations of her blood – clarity (or revelation) took hold, if only for a moment. My mother spread her arms in a wide, joyous embrace encompassing the air, the valley, the simple white church, the revolutionary soldiers’ graves like old men leaning forward as if to catch her words, their simple stones spattered with dark and aged moss. She lifted her face to the generous tree and closed her eyes. “Oh, I could stay here forever!” she exclaimed, clear as a bell. We laughed, but it was comforting to know that she found beauty and peace in what soon enough would become her resting place.
That vivid memory of my mother’s bliss dogged me all last week through the hilltops and valleys of Vermont. “Oh, I could stay here forever!” I am not on a quest for the perfect burial spot, but, rather, John and I are unsystematically trying on places that might do us for the rest of our living days. And the zigs and zags of small wooded valley roads, the rushing streams and lonely barns remind me once again of the way in which a physical place can create a deep emotional response. Beautiful. Yes, but more than that. What makes certain landscapes feel like home?
I have never entirely grown accustomed to the lovely flatlands of my adopted Midwestern home - the longer views, the open sky. But sometimes I forget what I’ve been missing. I have, too, come to admire the hills of Northern California where John lives and where I’m considering putting down roots - the stark and rolling cow country to the sea, the emerald greens of spring and the burnt oranges and gold of summer, fall and winter. But they do not clutch my heart in the same way Vermont hills and valleys do.
On the road in Vermont ©Cathy de Moll
Does it matter? Home is where the heart is. That is so. But also true: the heart knows when it's home. Pennsylvania, Maine, Vermont, all stages in my younger life, touch chords I did not even know I had, or did not then consider as important as I do now. Even after all these years, I discover to my surprise, I am an East Coast girl at heart.