Lisa-Jo sings out all the way from South Africa a prompt for us five minuters! Won't you join us, as we toss words in the air like balloons? This week it's about welcome. Here we go!
The grass crunches under my feet as I walk, hair tossing gently from side to side, boots muddied with the rain from this morning, or last night, and I hear it: welcome home. I've danced down this path in purple printed skirts and tights and I've slumped down this path at age 13 when I couldn't, and wouldn't understand that awful word funeral and the finality it breathed over the house, the garden, the pipe lying lonely on the sideboard, and now I walk down this path, up and out, into the promise I'm about to make.
I find the swingset, the one I played on when I was too small to remember anything but Mom's hand pressed firm against the small of my back and the feeling of being alive in the clean English air and the desperate desire even then to belong here, to be homesick for here, to own Greystones and keep chickens and yes, Mum, I'd whisper, can this be my house?
I sit there, praying love over the land, and I'm alone in the wonder of being 19 and planting my heart in England like a tiny seed that I keep praying grows a great miracle. Welcome home, I hear the land whisper back to me, and I look at the splashes of green and the trumpets of daffodils bobbing in the afternoon breeze and the gentle rustle of leaves tickling each other, and I find it: the promise of place.
Love,
Hilary
