“If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from Palaces crystal or otherwise, with an orchard behind me full of old trees and rough grass, and hedgerow paths among the endless fields where you meet nobody.”
George Eliot’s correspondence, quoted by Rebecca Mead, in My Life in Middlemarch

“I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields around me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.”
Virginia Woolf

What language does the landscape of home speak for you?
How did the seashore, or the suburban tract, the small town plazza, big city boulevard, or stretch of countryside where you grew up etch itself forever in you?
Is it, within your consciousness, a vague locus of nostalgia and longing, or does it sit on your heart as it does on mine, an oddly queasy feeling that unfolds octopus-like tentacles, pulling me back into a childhood I half-love, half-hate to remember, the place where I was once infinitely more whole, terrifyingly more fragile.

Most of us live far away from the places where we grew up, and though some of us (the smart ones) do return to build a nest not too far from where we once hatched, most of us have had make do in different climates, like disoriented birds that forgot their path of migration. In California, the Canada geese that used to make their annual journey south in the winter and return north in the good season collectively decided the strain of the journey was not worth it. They moved in permanently, and now shit year-round on well-to-do Californian’s water-thirsty lawns, waddling across overpriced suburbia in large entitled colonies, much like New Yorkers in Florida.

What kind of bird are you?

In my own family I sense different landscapes already well set in each of my children’s hearts. My oldest will forever long for the California where he was born. No weather is too hot or too dry for this happy-go-lucky soul. The rolling hills of oaks and madrones are where he belongs; he knows it, I know it, and I’ve already started to count down to the day when he announces California is where he’s headed back for College. My second son is a wild card. Having apparently inherited his mother’s lonesome streak, he’s long said his best life involves a cabin, a shotgun, and a donkey. The suburbs won’t hold him long. My Indian daughter for now will go wherever things are squishy, or pink, or loud, or preferably squishy, pink AND loud. Her primal home landscape is the quietly devastating cement floor of an orphanage bereft of flower, grass, and bird song. Have I wrapped enough of these around her to make up for it? Have I painted the world in bright enough colors to dislodge that grey cement floor out of her heart? I’ve chipped at it as best I could but worry it will forever dwell in her, a sedimental crust too big for my one small shovel. My Chinese son had a brighter beginning. His refusal to button his jacket up in the winter (or wear it all all) and his delight at wading knee-deep in snow while wearing shorts tell me he’s a Northerner with the fiercest of genes. He catches frogs faster than I do, and would do the same with snakes if I let him. He already knows a skinned knee is a small price to pay for a conquered hill.

My own landscape is as follows: Broad strokes of heather in purple bloom. Clusters of Sylvester pines accented by the hieroglyphs of birch bark. A small riverbed full of round pebbles in which my grandmother used to do laundry by hand. Sometimes, a fat trout. Wild blueberries. The jolt of an electric fence keeping the cow in and the children out. Fatty milk dripping on my chin, freshly squeezed out of said cow’s udder after I sneaked under said fence. A blanket of snow that muffles all sounds. A meadow of poppies, ranunculus, and cornflowers that reveals itself as the most suitable place for a small child’s worship of big things. A pair of isolated poplars as tense as exclamation marks. A forest in which to run alone and build a hut of string and bark. Long grass blades on which to chew while pretending to be a cowboy. Long grass blades with which crickets can be tickled out of their hole. The foggy breath of sheep in winter as they chew their cud and I sit atop my castle of hay. The piles of wonderfully smelly fleece in Spring. A caldron of bubbling strawberry jam. A small mountain of green beans to string—What a chore!

The question they ask me, always, is: why did you have to go so far? and:
Was it worth it?