« Home again. You’ve been away awhile – a few days, a week, a month, a year or two; it doesn’t matter.
The house has been empty, shuttered, braced against intrusion. You have the key. Inside all is dim, hushed. You take a few steps forward, drop the bags, and breathe in the slumber of your rooms. The dust has settled, but somehow the air is densed with stillness. Absence has a presence. You feel it and smell it and hear it; you sense it, the way an animal senses, fleetingly, in those first few moments through the door. The rooms are as you left them. But they’re not as you remember them. Absence warps, distorts. Everything seems slighlty aslant somehow. Bigger. Smaller.
Perhaps you’re unable to stand the silence. Or perhaps you can no longer resist the embrace of rooms poised to take you in. You’re moved to break the spell. You breathe in the heavy silence one last moment and you reach for a switch. Turn on the lights. You’re back.
There is such power in the return. The return of a loved one from a trip; the return of a child from school; the return of a book; the return of a favor. The return of the swans to the pond, the return of the flowers in the bed, year after year. We experience return so often in the routine of our daily lives that we forget to notice its magic. »
From Around the House and in The Garden, a Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement, by Dominique Browning.
