Page 145 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

I have long been nostalgic for a

home I never had, a feeling that my

family, who provided me a very

good home on the shoreline of

Lake Champlain, surrounded by

the Adirondack and Green

Mountains, has found difficult to

understand. As a teenager, I felt

generations of family bonds
Lake Champlain, South Hero Causeway in Late Winter

splintering at the same time that I

witnessed the wild spaces around me diminishing. I felt the ache of being someone who, by following

my heart’s desire to leave home and explore the world, knowingly participated in the twin losses of

family and wilderness. My brothers, my cousins and I were the first generation that was not planning to

live in the town where we grew up, even though it meant discontinuing the legacy of three generations

of family stories held in the memory of our neighborhood by the lake. My family never traveled; we

have no stories for journeying. And here I was in their midst, needing to experience life beyond the

family, beyond their chosen place. For over a decade, that desire would take me on airplanes, boats,

and trains to Canada, Europe, Central America, and Asia, as well as on numerous car trips criss-

crossing the United States. To compound matters, I would expend finite natural resources to take

myself where I wanted to go. The strength of my desire left me no choice. I had to leave. I had to

explore. As a young woman, all I knew was that it hurt to want what I wanted.

I have curled myself around that ache, hidden it like a family secret, wrapped it with a silk cloth of

protectiveness. I am surprised now to find beauty in the language of its cry. In what appears to me a

not-entirely-even trade with the wilderness, my husband and I have swapped our meager savings for

47 acres of forest land and wild animal habitat high in the hills of eastern Vermont to try to learn

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