I have been a bit obsessed with the idea of living in Middle Earth lately (we watched The Hobbit this weekend). My conversation with Josh went something like this:
"I'm obsessed with Middle Earth. I want to live there."
[Chuckles]. "Wait -- like, New Zealand? Or Middle Earth?"
"Middle Earth. Mostly I just want to live in a hobbit hole."
I really do. I want the lovely round door, the larder stocked with huge wheels of cheese, loaves of bread, and tasty sausages. I want to sit in my garden, flowers bobbing near my head, talking to Gandalf when he stops by. I want to sing hypnotic dwarf songs around the hearth. I want one of those dwarves to look like Richard Armitage. I can say this because Josh has his own man-crush on Thorin--after we saw The Hobbit for the first time, we had a conversation something like this:
Josh: "Do you mind if I dream about Thorin tonight?"
Me: "Depends on what kind of dream we're talking about."
Exasperated: "Like, where we go on adventures and stuff together."
Me: "That's fine." Pause. "So long as you don't mind if I dream about Thorin."
And so the nerdiness deepens. I've tried to figure out where it's coming from. I've been beset with Narnia and Hogwarts longings in the past, but this hobbit-hole longing is palpable. I mean, I really want to live there. I'm nowhere near the educated Middle Earth nerd that my husband is (he actually knows the mythology), or that my sister Sarah was (she dreamily envisioned accompanying the Fellowship as their cook when she was a 10 year-old reading the trilogy). I am definitely not the winner when we play Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit at McDonald family Christmases (sister Emily usually wins, but I think this has something more to do with Vigo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom than it does Aragorn and Legolas; her girlhood crushes were pretty intense). My brothers could still probably sing the orc marching songs from the old cartoon version of The Return of the King.
All this being said, I blame the time of year. There is something about the ripening of spring that makes me want to take to the open road, the backcountry, the anywhere-but-here. It's a delight to be out-of-doors in this blessed window between the bone-wet cold of winter and the unbearable weight of a Virginia summer. This is the time of year when I historically took all my back-packing trips overseas. In 2001, in the bygone days before 9/11 and the euro, I wandered Europe for 5 weeks with two dear friends. It was a heady experience--my breathless entrance upon the wide world as an almost-grown-up. Memories of a full moon in Venice, waterfalls and white peaks in Switzerland, folk-dancing in a sunlit park in Barcelona, brioche and chocolate in Limoges, and swimming in the Scottish North Sea at midnight still follow me.
Four years later in the spring of 2005 I walked through Scotland, England and Wales with twenty-five others, and from that Wordsworthian utopia I never recovered. When May approaches every year I think of grass-clogged hiking boots, rain-smeared journals, the smell of honeysuckle and roses, and the indefinable joy of true camaraderie. Hiking, reading, learning, seeing, living--it was a sort of personal Eden; a removal from the world that nevertheless equipped me for the inevitable re-entry and deeper immersion into the world.
Two springs after that in 2007 I went to Iceland with my sisters--a crisp, austere, mysterious island, filled with enormously tall, well-groomed, very good-looking blonde people. The landscape was eerie, still, and very beautiful. It almost never got dark, and I remember sitting outside our little mountain cabin, overlooking a black-rock desert stretching to the sea, writing in my journal near midnight in sharp, clean, pale light.
Spring of 2010 saw me headed once more for a northern isle with my sisters--Ireland. It was a week of steak-and-ale pie, buttery scones, Irish cheddar, ancestral lands, coastal hikes, windy hedgerows, and musical people. We slept in a castle, wandered little villages, walked the Giant's Causeway, and almost sailed to Skellig, the mysterious monastic clump of rock in the Atlantic.
And then just a year later, in 2011, I went to other ancestral lands with my newly-trothed husband. For 10 days we hiked around Scotland, rarely indoors. We scaled deserted mountains at sunset and ran down them again in twilight. We skipped rocks on lochs and pranced among the bluebells (actually one of us skipped the rocks; the other pranced... I'll let you figure out which was who). We trod past ruined abbeys, along ancient Roman roads, waving fields of brilliant yellow rape seed, and winding river beds. We munched on apples and bread and cheese as we went; we nibbled on shortbread and pasties on mountain-tops. Food tasted better and we slept more deeply; time wasn't measured by minutes and hours but more by the movement of the sun and the hunger in our bellies.
I suppose every season carries historical association and the weight of memory, yet every spring I wrestle with the restless Romantic (note the capital "R") urge to be up and away. Maybe my foreign springtime jaunts have ruined me. But there is something about this visceral period of spring--when color is everywhere and the very air is laden with the smell of sweet growing things--that makes it hard to be an indoor, industrial-aged urbanite. It is the time to be frolicking through blossoms, drinking nectar, getting grass stains, having dirt under the fingernails. It is the time to be in the bosom of nature, or at the very least, cozily ensconced in a hobbit hole.
And so this year, instead of wandering the gorgeous, remote places of my girlhood imaginings, I wander Virginia's parks and playgrounds with my boy. We pick dandelions and clover; we eat Cheerios and string cheese. We crawl through mulch and get staticky hair from plastic slides. Instead of Cumbrian bluebells we have Virginia bluebells; instead of wild garlic growing in primeval forests, I watch the dogwoods flower and azaleas begin to open next to trim townhouses. The romantic wandering in lonely, desperately beautiful places is put aside for another age; for now, Jack sits on my shoulders and smashes cherry blossoms into my hair while I tell him about hobbit-holes and the good things of the earth.
"I'm obsessed with Middle Earth. I want to live there."
[Chuckles]. "Wait -- like, New Zealand? Or Middle Earth?"
"Middle Earth. Mostly I just want to live in a hobbit hole."
I really do. I want the lovely round door, the larder stocked with huge wheels of cheese, loaves of bread, and tasty sausages. I want to sit in my garden, flowers bobbing near my head, talking to Gandalf when he stops by. I want to sing hypnotic dwarf songs around the hearth. I want one of those dwarves to look like Richard Armitage. I can say this because Josh has his own man-crush on Thorin--after we saw The Hobbit for the first time, we had a conversation something like this:
Josh: "Do you mind if I dream about Thorin tonight?"
Me: "Depends on what kind of dream we're talking about."
Exasperated: "Like, where we go on adventures and stuff together."
Me: "That's fine." Pause. "So long as you don't mind if I dream about Thorin."
And so the nerdiness deepens. I've tried to figure out where it's coming from. I've been beset with Narnia and Hogwarts longings in the past, but this hobbit-hole longing is palpable. I mean, I really want to live there. I'm nowhere near the educated Middle Earth nerd that my husband is (he actually knows the mythology), or that my sister Sarah was (she dreamily envisioned accompanying the Fellowship as their cook when she was a 10 year-old reading the trilogy). I am definitely not the winner when we play Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit at McDonald family Christmases (sister Emily usually wins, but I think this has something more to do with Vigo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom than it does Aragorn and Legolas; her girlhood crushes were pretty intense). My brothers could still probably sing the orc marching songs from the old cartoon version of The Return of the King.
All this being said, I blame the time of year. There is something about the ripening of spring that makes me want to take to the open road, the backcountry, the anywhere-but-here. It's a delight to be out-of-doors in this blessed window between the bone-wet cold of winter and the unbearable weight of a Virginia summer. This is the time of year when I historically took all my back-packing trips overseas. In 2001, in the bygone days before 9/11 and the euro, I wandered Europe for 5 weeks with two dear friends. It was a heady experience--my breathless entrance upon the wide world as an almost-grown-up. Memories of a full moon in Venice, waterfalls and white peaks in Switzerland, folk-dancing in a sunlit park in Barcelona, brioche and chocolate in Limoges, and swimming in the Scottish North Sea at midnight still follow me.
Two springs after that in 2007 I went to Iceland with my sisters--a crisp, austere, mysterious island, filled with enormously tall, well-groomed, very good-looking blonde people. The landscape was eerie, still, and very beautiful. It almost never got dark, and I remember sitting outside our little mountain cabin, overlooking a black-rock desert stretching to the sea, writing in my journal near midnight in sharp, clean, pale light.
Spring of 2010 saw me headed once more for a northern isle with my sisters--Ireland. It was a week of steak-and-ale pie, buttery scones, Irish cheddar, ancestral lands, coastal hikes, windy hedgerows, and musical people. We slept in a castle, wandered little villages, walked the Giant's Causeway, and almost sailed to Skellig, the mysterious monastic clump of rock in the Atlantic.
And then just a year later, in 2011, I went to other ancestral lands with my newly-trothed husband. For 10 days we hiked around Scotland, rarely indoors. We scaled deserted mountains at sunset and ran down them again in twilight. We skipped rocks on lochs and pranced among the bluebells (actually one of us skipped the rocks; the other pranced... I'll let you figure out which was who). We trod past ruined abbeys, along ancient Roman roads, waving fields of brilliant yellow rape seed, and winding river beds. We munched on apples and bread and cheese as we went; we nibbled on shortbread and pasties on mountain-tops. Food tasted better and we slept more deeply; time wasn't measured by minutes and hours but more by the movement of the sun and the hunger in our bellies.
I suppose every season carries historical association and the weight of memory, yet every spring I wrestle with the restless Romantic (note the capital "R") urge to be up and away. Maybe my foreign springtime jaunts have ruined me. But there is something about this visceral period of spring--when color is everywhere and the very air is laden with the smell of sweet growing things--that makes it hard to be an indoor, industrial-aged urbanite. It is the time to be frolicking through blossoms, drinking nectar, getting grass stains, having dirt under the fingernails. It is the time to be in the bosom of nature, or at the very least, cozily ensconced in a hobbit hole.
And so this year, instead of wandering the gorgeous, remote places of my girlhood imaginings, I wander Virginia's parks and playgrounds with my boy. We pick dandelions and clover; we eat Cheerios and string cheese. We crawl through mulch and get staticky hair from plastic slides. Instead of Cumbrian bluebells we have Virginia bluebells; instead of wild garlic growing in primeval forests, I watch the dogwoods flower and azaleas begin to open next to trim townhouses. The romantic wandering in lonely, desperately beautiful places is put aside for another age; for now, Jack sits on my shoulders and smashes cherry blossoms into my hair while I tell him about hobbit-holes and the good things of the earth.
