The first time I saw this place, I knew I had come home. I do not mean I knew it in a peaceful, comforting sort of way, the way one recognizes an old friend; that first time it was like an electric shock, sharp and abrupt, strange and terribly painful, and it changed everything. With it, the life I had disintegrated. From the first moment this was my home. How can that be understood?

But after that initial shock of recognition, after the first changes and the settling in, the shiftings in me came more slowly, took their time in rooting. I cannot say that I lost right away the sense of distinguishing myself from what was around me. I heard the birds, looked at the flowers, but always I was separate from them, someone listening and looking. I do not know when the distinction disappeared, but it must not have been for a very long time. Not until I became a part of it, which is a different thing from feeling at home.

It was spring then, which was a blessing because if I had arrived later, toward autumn, I most surely would not have been ready for winter. Odd — I see that remembering has separated me from it; that looking back at myself as an object of my memory has made everything I saw then an object as well, so that I have lost the unity. It is part of my confusion now, my disorientation. At this moment I don’t belong, although the knowledge that I am home has not changed.

Of course it’s a different season now, summer instead of early spring, but that does not make the difference. The rhythm of the seasons is quite natural to me now. Each year, I know, the same sensations, the same breaths recur; there is security knowing that in the spring I will feel the new life, my own joy, a wish to touch all young things, the crocuses and snowdrops, searching them out, walking, the tenderness of finding a cluster of small flowers hiding from still-chilly winds, waking in the mornings, hearing each day the return of more birds until the air is filled with them.

And in the summer working, caring for the garden, cultivating my plants, my food, inhaling the sun, seeing my skin become brown just as the flowers are also growing their colours, and my beloved garden plants are delivering their brilliant food. The long evenings, the sense of having achieved in each day what there was to be achieved.