the common milkweed: Home and Away

Friday, March 27, 2026

Home and Away

We are not settled people. Dreamers. Thinkers. Readers. Adventurers. Rewilders. That's us. Challenging beliefs. Challenging ways to live. Challenging ourselves. Maybe returning to where we began?

Unsettler #1:

Unsettler #2:

We are home amongst the plants and the birds and the rivers, so home is many places and many places seem to be what we require for happiness.

Sweet Pinkster Azalea, Rhododendron canescens:

Purple Thistle, Cirsium horridulum:

Common Sweetleaf, Symplocos tinctoria:

Dung Beetle working a dog poop pile:

Wolf spider:

Gopher Tortoise:

Clear, clear, clear water:

Home and away with away also being home...it's not the easiest place to live from, but it is a beautiful and exciting place to live from.

Our feet need to move.

Our eyes need to see new landscapes.

Our noses want to smell new smells.

Our skins crave new winds. Hot. Cold. Anything but the same.

Our hands want new soil to touch. New plants. New rocks. New becomes familiar. New becomes home.

Silk moth cocoons greet us everywhere. We've never seen so many! We aren't sure of the species on this one, but...

we also find passed-on luna moths everywhere.

Steve embraces new landscapes like it's air. He requires them to live. How lucky we are to have found one another!

Steve can't hold tight as well as this lizard, but he tried.

Our minds quiet. Our spirits settle. This will always be us. Both. Nomadic with a jumping off point. Our presence, a safety check for the land that said yes in Morrow County, Ohio. The land that grows plants we planted. That shelters and welcomes insects and birds with these plants. We are the barrier from the cutter downers. The mowers. The non-acknowledgers of the human place in the world - in the natural world.

The unisexual ambystomid salamander eggs are safe in their handmade vernal pool:

The rewilded and protected land shelters out of range birds every winter for the last three winters. A gray catbird and an American robin both drink water in a wildly frozen and snow covered land. Both find fruiting staghorn berries to eat so they might survive.

Coyotes pass through this land unharassed and with shelter from the harassers.

We live here and we live away and living away allows us to live here. It settles us here, too, and when we start to get grouchy and restless, we know it's time to go and so we do.

We see interesting things everywhere and we learn from people who know. It's remarkable what humans can do and learn and share. From my Pops: "Jennifer Anne that is a very old high pressure pump probably used in the oil wells. It’s too old to have been used in fracking! The pipe flanges are common for high pressure. We had pumps similar to that at Foamex. The pumps were for moving a slurry resin with a great deal of solids. The pump rotor is like a very coarse pitch screw and the housing is mated to the pitch but female."

We hike 50 miles. We camp in the sand and exfoliate ourselves for days.

New friends are old friends. I can't write how much this delights us. Old friends, right next to our tent.

American persimmon:

We sweat. A lot. And then we dip in the river. We feel the watery relief envelop us and we think we've never felt anything so good.

We get dirty and the simplicity of the days makes us not care. We walk endlessly. We eat when we can. We pick off ticks, itch chigger bites, blacken a toenail (Jennifer, always). We find gifts everywhere. Dumped ice from a work crew becomes our saving grace at the end of a very hot, 17 miler day. We suck ice, walk and zone out. Present.

A picnic shelter from a friendly Florida Trail neighbor offers a perfect place to dry our gear from the prior night's thunderstorm. To sit at a table feels regal. A plug present offers juice for our phones, but we didn't bring our plug so we stay on airplane mode. A gift in itself.

We are aware of the difference in wildlife species and seasonality from our sticks and brick home. The northern parulas sing along with the yellow-throated warblers, pine warblers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, yellow-throated and blue-headed vireos. Alligators live in the water. Sandhill cranes sing and hunt with the great-blue herons and great egrets. The cricket frogs tap, tap, tap. Just like marbles.

We acknowledge the labor of humans in the past hoping for a similar program for the humans now.

When we get off the trail, we sleep out of the back of our truck. Everything has a place. The ledges. The pouches. The wood drawer. Another home. We feel comfort. We sit up cozy and snug reading.

The cats call our names home, but we tell them soon. We must recharge. We must be in our other home. We must become whole. We must become ourselves. And to do that, we must be home AND away.