Home: The best destination

I began this blog by deciding to call it "Meandering through Maples". In the end, although trees had a great deal to do with what we saw and enjoyed, I don't think that maples were the most numerous. They were spectacular in their colours, but not as much as the birch, aspen and ash trees. The seemingly endless forests of conifers provide a huge contribution to the economy of Canada but were also quite forbidding, mysterious and dark. Maples though, were the ones I was always on the lookout for after my Canadian friend wished me well for my trip and hoped the maples would put on a show for my visit. They did. I thought of my friend many times, and celebrated her life every day, and felt the frisson of both her loss and delight at the discovery every time.

An hour journey from Melbourne airport to home was the last phase of our adventure. When we drove into our driveway at home, we saw the ancient millwheel that we asked our artist neighbour if we could host until he could find its new home. It is gorgeous, big, solid and warm in the spring sun and ever so heavy. It is not quite in the right spot yet, but it will be adjusted soon, and like us, it will settle in for a long and pleasant stay where it will be at home and at rest. I opened the car door and a kookaburra greeted me with a loud and outrageous laugh that filled me with a lightness that came some way to overcoming the lethargy and heaviness that comes from long haul travel. I said thank you to my friend in the tree and looked around to see all the azaleas bursting out, the camellia still flowering along with the daphne, the dogwood budding and the spent daffodils starting to wilt. In the back yard the veggie patch was showing early promise, the treeferns on the fern walk had opened up new pups and the small bulbs in the dark corner wrought iron garden "bed" had flowered into blue profusion. It was a wonderful welcome home.

Perhaps our journey might have been called "Wandering through Woods", "Yearning for the Yellow Leaf", "Conferring with Conifers"... or any other little piece of alliteration, but in the end, the title was all about discovering a new place, a new set of inspirations and people, a new story to hear and a new set of values to try to ponder and embrace. The meandering sometimes felt a bit like a brisk walk, or a fleeting, frozen moment before racing on to the next vision, but no-one could hope to discover all that we found and did in under five weeks and have meandered their way through it. Perhaps the meandering will come now, not with our weary bones, but with our minds as we think about our time in the northern climes. We can go back over the written text that this page now brings to a close, remind each other of the sight, the sound and the story that each entry invokes and meander through the memories.Read more