Transition Zone

I see now that our house is a box of light. It is airy and simple and its wood floors shine; it is mostly plain but for the Turkish rug in the living room whose geometric pattern has faded to pastels, and the extravagant outside world that is visible through every window, clamoring for attention. Things are colorful and contoured out there beyond those windows, animated and complicated.

The shadows on the hills shift shape, the trees in the orchard dance, the sky keeps changing. Even in the night a layered composition of coyote calls might suddenly wake me, or the starlight throbbing on the roof, or the wind, or the silence. Maybe I have to go away sometimes to remember the sense of refuge here, the familiarity and surprise of it, the sigh it evokes.

But everything is different, too. A death in the family casts a shadow, and I am newly arrived into a strange season already in process, the effects of which are unfolding daily. In fact, I just noticed that today happens to be October 12, the anniversary of my father’s death thirty-two years ago, when I was exactly the age of my newly deceased brother-in-law’s oldest daughter.

How I ache for her and for her siblings! I remember it all too well, the initial shock transitioning into an absence incomprehensibly interminable. I am living testimonial to the ability to survive and even thrive afterwards, but I know there is a sadness inside that never entirely goes away. You just work around it.

Meanwhile, aside from a sea change in family dynamics and that ineffable sense of loss, there is the matter of mind realigning with place, and of body catching up with geography. I am still confused about what time it is, falling into a stupor around dinnertime, going to bed too early, and then bolting awake at some crazy hour uncertain for a moment where I am. Images of Turkey are cropping up like incongruous dreams, and afternoons with my daughter in England are still so fresh that for a moment I would swear she is in the room upstairs asleep in the bed that once was hers.

Call it jet lag if you will, but it feels more colossal than that. We do the impossible and expect to adjust.

So I am in a transition zone. (And aren’t we all, and always?) Here at the ranch, the term assumes a literal dimension because of geographic location: it is a bioregional border zone that incorporates both northern and southern species of plant life -- from sword fern and tanbark oak to summer holly and coastal sage scrub. In this neighborhood, we are literally neither here nor there, ever; it’s a fact of life.

Even if I didn’t know that, I could look down at this canyon from one of the hills alongside, and clearly see the shift from black-green, dense with vegetation, to the sandy earth and pale rock upon which this house is sitting. The hour, too, is tangibly transitional, moving now from darkness to daylight, skylight to fog. Despite scorching heat in the valley yesterday, the angle of light was decidedly autumnal, and clouds cooled the coastline, and fall is settling in more confidently.

Coming home is a process, and I am re-entering, little by little. My head contains new experiences but everything moved in my absence. Did I know how precious and amazing it is to be alive and loved and here? I often said I did, but I didn’t know it to its fullest depths.

I will get used to things again, but hopefully not completely. In a funny way this unmoored, out of kilter feeling reflects a true reality. We cover great distances, slip around time zones, try to make static sense of things that can only be fluid. I am astonished and confused and transmuting into otherness, ultimately becoming whatever I am. I am grateful and sad, grounded and disoriented.

I am a woman who has been to Istanbul, and that is the least important thing about me.