Going Home

Our family goes to an island in the Georgian Bay for a week's vacation every summer since we moved to Pittsburgh. I wrote this on the way home last summer, and just found it in my little red notebook.

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The leaving makes the time there more real.

As we slice through the water but leave no trace, the mark is instead on me. My eyes try to drink in the essence of sky and rocks, windswept trees and water, but they change before me even as I look -- becoming straighter, tamer, thicker, as if we are stepping back from the edge of the world and returning to the sheltering arms of real life. But my mind like a compass is unerringly turned back, toward the island.

It is not a place but a Place. The archetype of Earh, Sky and Water clashing and blending in equal parts. You can't help but feel it. It gets under your skin, in your blood. But more wondrous and devastating is this: It gets into your heart. It gets into your heart, so that every beat whispers of wind in pines and the kiss of water on stone, and every leave-taking is really a promise to go back.


Georgian Bay, July 2007