Camille has put a lot of work, love, and intention into this garden next to our front door. It is now mostly pollinator friendly perennials – Sweet William, Miniature Dahlias, Echinaceas, Butterfly Weed, Milkweed, Gladiolus, Purple Tradescantia, and some remnant Mondo Grass.

We wandered out after dinner to have a look at what was happening in our little slice of the world.

A wheel bug nymph and carpenter bee checking each other out.

Echinaceas are great! So many colors, so dependable on their spring return. Each one is like a firework caught in time.

Retirement is great! I highly recommend it. Unless you’re a bee.

Bob and I have been on the move all our lives and went into hyper-mobilization after we got together.  We’ve moved every fifteen months on average over the eighteen years since we threw in together. Like they sing in that song, wherever we hung our hats was our home.  Or rather, wherever we lay down together was home.

My roots go back to New Jersey, specifically the two neighborhoods of my childhood, one in Atlantic Highlands and the other in West Long Branch.  Bob’s roots go back to New Orleans and Ghana, Africa.  Lucky for me I can still drive up to Aunt Kathy’s house, give her a hug and scamper next door to my cousin Mark’s house which used to be our Nana’s house.

Now that we’ve settled into an established neighborhood in North Carolina, we’re putting energy into establishing roots.  We joined the potluck circuit, taking turns hosting a space for a leisurely dinner with our friends in the neighborhood.  We began stewarding the grounds and trails.  And we met our neighbors to the east over the fence.

Fred and Reda have lived in the house next door for a long time.  Their yard is so pretty we consider it the gold standard for grounds keeping at the bend.  More importantly, they have solid roots in the area, so I feel a little more rooted just knowing them.  When Reda described where she grew up, she gestured over her shoulder to a property less than a mile away.

The “Home Place” is what she called it.  Unbeknownst to her, Reda had just given me a new phrase to describe the roots of my childhood.  “I guess my home place is Nana’s house,” I mused and went back to my mowing.

A few weeks later, Bob and I made our annual trek north, and this year we started off in the Shenandoah Valley with the Armentrouts.  Sitting in Mark and Catherine’s living room, we heard the term again.

“That was their home place,” Catherine was saying about another relative, pointing to a place not so far away.  It’s funny how you can usually tell where something is when someone points, based on how high they hold their finger, how vigorously they move their arm and where they send their eyes.

On we went to visit family in Shippensburg; Mom, Dad, brothers John and Bob, John’s wife Darla and their children Charity and Brandon and their families.  We slept and ate in the beautiful stone house that Darla’s father helped his father build many years ago and which had later been moved from their Home Place just a few blocks away on a truck to its current site.

Darla’s parents Sonny and Dolora joined us, my brother, their daughter, their children and their children’s children for dinner which reminded me that Dolora’s parents, Darla’s grandparents were also from this Pennsylvania valley.  There are lots of roots for my kin here, but not so much for me.  I moved to Shippensburg with my family in the fall of 1970 and left town the day after my senior graduation on June 5th, 1972.

After four nights in the Cumberland Valley, we made our way to Atlantic Highlands.  We hugged Aunt Kathy, sipped some wine and scampered next door with Mark for a look at his beautifully preserved testament to our heritage.  He has lovingly tended to the gardens and house, keeping it pretty much just as it was when our grandmother lived in it and also added many framed photos of our ancestors.  Mark is the historian in the family.

Talk turned to worthy topics such as Nana’s potato leek soup and poppy seed bread.  We vowed to re-create these legendary dishes next year in the same kitchen they were born in before trundling off to dinner at cousin Frank’s in nearby Rumson.

Frank’s beautiful wife Shawn and their lovely daughter Houston showed off the grounds and gardens as we walked down to the dock across their manicured lawn.  “Gold Standard!” I thought and then I asked Shawn how long they had lived in their house.  “At least twenty years” was the reply.  I wondered what that might feel like.  Having just signed a thirty year note, I might get the chance.  That is, if I live to be seventy-five!

The longest I have ever lived in any one house was seven years between 1963 and 1970 at 64 Hollywood Avenue in West Long Branch, a mere twelve miles south of the old neighborhood in Atlantic Highlands.  This was the house I lived in with my five younger brothers.  Most of my dreams take place either in this house or in the house in Atlantic Highlands.

64 Hollywood Avenue was where we climbed trees, watched Disney, Daktari and the Honeymooners on TV with the whole family, painted with oils in one of the three sun porches and stood back to watch my Dad ignite gun powder in the birdbath.  We ate all our meals together in this house with the exception of Sunday Dinner at Nana’s in Atlantic Highlands.

The old Victorian was enormous, more than 4,000 square feet with eleven rooms, multiple staircases, fireplaces, glassed-paned sun rooms, and balconies, a basement and a wrap-around porch.  It was a later, larger addition to the Norwood Park Cottage Colony built in which was developed in the latter part of the 1880’s.

“The Victorian styled cottages constructed at Norwood Park were built as summer rental homes at a popular summer resort for wealthy summer vacationers” according to Norwood Park – An Exclusive Summer Cottage Colony by Robert J. Fischer

“Later larger cottages were built on Hollywood Avenue west of Pinewood Avenue the one remaining home of this type lost its third floor to fire and is now refinished as s two story dwelling.”

The remaining larger cottage referred to above is assuredly the same the house I lived in with my brothers.  The other, older cottages housed our neighbors and childhood friends. The doctor who delivered my youngest brother lived across the street and we often played with two of his sons.

The other families were all large and mostly Catholic like ours.  Most of us walked, rode the bus or our bikes to the same school, St. Jerome School less than a mile away.  Each home boasted between four and fourteen kids for us to play with. We ran through the neighborhood or rode our bikes and played baseball, football, hide and seek, combat, cowboys and indians and my favorite, “who dies the best.”

There was a riding stable next door which drew me like a magnet.  Whenever I could slip away from my responsibilities as the oldest daughter, I’d slip through one of the thin spots in the hedge and cross the riding arena into the barn and courtyard area.  There I learned to clean stalls, feed, water and groom horses, rake the yard and recondition leather tack.

This is where the sounds, smells and rhythms of the horse world left their imprint on my psyche.  I strove to impress my friends by whinnying just like a horse as we walked home together from the bus stop.  Their eyes always gleamed when we heard one of the horses call back from the other side of the hedge.

This year, the morning after a fabulous meal at Frank and Shawn’s, Bob and I drove over to West Long Branch and parked beside the old house.  As I gazed up at the balcony outside what was once John and Bob’s bedroom, Bob noticed that the house was for sale.  A huge lump rose in my throat. With the simple addition of a realtor’s sign, I realized that this house was much more than a place where I once lived.  I stood there for awhile, basking in the happy feeling that I too had a Home Place.

Zebras have long been a theme in our life together. Years ago, we dreamed up a comic strip which featured a zebra named “Spot.” We were going to call it “Savannaland” and it would be a combination of Disneyland, Dilbertj and the Far Side.

Spot, the main character was based upon a photograph in National Geographic of a zebra with a spot between two of its stripes. The premise was that Savannaland was engineered to create the illusion of reality.

The animals clocked in every day in an underground tunnel. Their job was to provide a Safari-like experience for human tourists who were carted around in land rovers just out of sight of the inner workings of the theme park. Spot was one of the operations guys who worked alongside make up artists, cafeteria workers and actors to create a lifelike Savanna.

And then there’s the zebra picture. For as long as we’ve been together, we’ve hung a painting of two galloping zebras on the wall inside our back door. In the picture, the zebras are running away as fast as they can. They hang by the door to remind us not to hesitate when it’s time to leave.

It’s hard to say where we’ll hang our zebra picture after we move this time. We think this may be our last move. For one thing, we’ve grown very attached to the people in our new neighborhood. We work together, eat together and play together. For another, we’re in our fifties now and this will be our fourteenth move since we got together seventeen years ago. In fact, I’m able to remember more than forty homes going back to when I was two.

We plan on naming our new yard art “Spot” and putting him out to graze the front yard beside the pampas grass. He isn’t pretending or running like those other zebras in our life. He stands head up, with all four feet firmly rooted on the ground. This zebra stops here, proof that we’ve finally found our perfect spot.

So naturally, when we moved into Camelina, we set aside a kitchen drawer for reused plastic bags.  Twenty-one months later, the drawer is so full, I was unable to shut it.

This morning I pulled the drawer out, got down on my knees and peered into the darkness.  There were a few bags stuck behind the drawer.  So I pulled them out.  And there was some used parchment paper and aluminum, so I pulled that out, too.  I kept pulling stuff out until I had a mound of used stuff.

Sad to say, most of the stuff that fell behind the drawer will end up in our compost pileand landfill.  I didn’t feel comfortable reusing the everything that has lain on the floor and I didn’t have enough room in the drawer for all of it anyway.

I learned a lesson today.  I learned that it isn’t enough to keep washing and putting away bags.  I need to manage them.  I learned that the road to hell is paved with lightly used plastic bags.

We’ve got a tiny farmer in the house. For about a month Bob and I have been noticing little piles of sunflower seeds in unusual places. At first we thought Bob had spilled a few seeds on his way outside to the bird feeders. The first pile that came to our attention was located atop the cabinet just inside the kitchen door. Some of the seeds were whole and some of them had been eaten and were just husks. But then, a few days later, I got up from the yoga mat with a sunflower seed stuck to my knee.

About the same time, we started hearing a mouse in the house. One night, I heard what sounded like something running laps around the hot tub in our bedroom. I got up and went in the other room to fetch my flashlight, came back and shone it into the tub. There was a big-eyed, chubby mouse, perched on the drain in the middle of the tub. I was half asleep, so all I could do was stare. The mouse stared back at me with big eyes and didn’t move a muscle.

Since then, we’ve seen a mouse run right across the room in broad daylight – twice across the kitchen and once across the living room. Bob did a little research and as far as we can tell we are dealing with a wood mouse. My mom said if you start seeing mice run across the room it’s because there are a few of them. Maybe they feel like they have you out numbered. We always assume there is only one and maybe this is the truth. Who can know?

A few nights later, I woke to the sound of a snapping mouse trap in the kitchen and jumped out of bed to investigate. There was a big, fat mouse sitting on the floor a foot from the trap. I put a bucket over it, slid the dustpan underneath and pulled the bucket off. The critter didn’t try to move off the dustpan. It just sat there, staring into space. So I took it and flung it outside.

Triumphantly, I went back to bed, sure the mouse would die outside in the night from the wounds that caused it to go into shock. The next day I searched for its carcass without success.

Lately, we’ve seen a few sunflower seedlings sprouting up in the potted plants. We know we didn’t plant sunflowers in the African Violets, so we can only assume it is the work of the mouse or mice. Strangely, the plants themselves have not been disturbed and there has not been any spilled potting soil. It is very mysterious, indeed.

The weirdest thing about all of this is that unlike other mice that have entered our home, this one has not gotten into the food or left mouse poop on the floor. What it does seem to enjoy is tearing out the fringes from the edges of our silk carpets. And, of course, planting and stashing sunflower seeds it’s brought in from the bird feeders. Bob noticed it had chewed some of the stuffing out of one of his shoes. I had a Western saddle in here for a few weeks and later found little bits of saddle fleece behind the stove.

At this point, we have no idea how to get rid of this mouse. It’s behavior is unlike any other mouse we’ve ever had in the house. It doesn’t seem interested in our food, so trying to entice it into a trap is futile. All the farmer mouse seems interested in is storing up seeds and nesting materials. Which leads us to believe that it must be a female. We may just have to get used to living with this strange little critter.

Yesterday I put my slippers on for the first time in a week and quickly took my foot out again. I had felt something strange under my toes, so I shook it down into the heel and here is what I saw: