TOWARDS HOME
When her husband dies at forty, with his head turned away from her, Anna realizes that she has never really lived, does not even know how to. Is it too late? The path is difficult, and even dangerous, but over the course of a summer, Anna surprises herself by moving to the country, where she finds many teachers.
Surrounded by the strong characters of her artist parents and her professor husband, Anna had never become her own person. “As she studied the rooms of their house, it was beginning to come to her that she might have conceded more to him than she had ever dared to let herself thin. And now, in place of Jack’s life, she would have to recreate her own life in an entirely new way.”
And so begins Anna’s quest for home within herself and in a community and in a landscape. In the now-vanishing farm and woodland north of the hamlet of Leith, she finds wisdom in a community of unexpected friends, and makes a commitment to a very different kind of life, where love of the land is central.
After she arrives at the weathered old country farmhouse where she hoped to find peace, Anna feels as if she is being broken, piece by piece. It is as if everything she had been is being stripped away from her. As she realizes how little of her own self exists, she feels that she herself is in the last stages of dying. The stakes are that she has reached a place where she can’t go back, and yet she has no idea of how to go ahead. Only when she stops trying and learns to trust that help will come, does she break through to form her own life.
Eventually, she is given permission to rest. She discovers that simply being feels enough, drinking in the feeling of heritage that permeates the land and her surroundings, including her new house itself, the former home of an impoverished old coverlet weaver.
By going through a process of losses, both by actively seeking and by waiting, Anna comes to a new, sure sense of home, which includes an unlikely family of neighbors. part of healing is reconciliation. “We still need to conduct an interior dialogue with the dead,” advocates French psychologist Marie de Hennezel. “Can love stain backwards, making sweet what was bitter?” asks Anna.
It has been said that the greatest adventure of our lives is finding our way back home. By the end of a summer full of surprising new joys and challenges, Anna is well on her way to a wholly new life as an artist.
