In August, before Julia left for college and Joe and I left Denver for good, I spent ten days at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center assisting at a retreat being led by Pema Chödrön. The name of the retreat was “When Things Fall Apart,” after her most recent book.

I was helping with the cooking at the house where Pema was staying and leading discussion groups and meeting with participants about their meditation practice. Four hundred people were there, most of them women, many of them grappling with their own version of falling apart. I had known Pema since I first became a student of Trungpa Rinpoche, long before she became a well-known teacher and author. Her books had been road maps for me on my path, showing up exactly when I needed them. I had read The Wisdom of No Escape when I was grappling with a very old depression and years of dissociating through alcohol and meaningless sex. Simply reading the title set off a panic attack in me so intense I thought I was having a heart attack.

The timing of a retreat about things falling apart was perfect.

Every few days, all the meditation instructors would meet with Pema as a group. It was supposed to be a time to talk about the students we were seeing, but of course most of the time we talked about ourselves and what we were going through. At one meeting, my friend Helen spoke about her struggles with meditation practice. “When I sit, all I experience is numbness. Nothing else, just endless numbness,” she said.

I was sitting opposite her in the circle, and her words hit me like a javelin. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I suddenly saw that during all the years of sitting on my cushion, congratulating myself on how calm I was becoming, most of that time I was just numb. I was checked out, and it was no different from when I drank too much, only without the remorse and the hangover. Joe was right. Meditation practice hadn’t penetrated all the membranes, all that thick flesh that had grown around my heart. Fundamentally, little had changed.

Toward the end of the retreat, I could feel my anxiety growing, with the big move coming up when I got back to Denver. Nights of little sleep and days spent with four hundred people all going through their own roller coaster ride of insights and breakthroughs and despair and panic were taking their toll.

The day before the retreat was to end, Pema was performing a Refuge Ceremony for a group of participants who were new to meditation and now felt it was time to give up searching everywhere for the perfect solution to their suffering and instead make a commitment to a practice of Buddhist meditation and teachings as their path to freedom. At the end of the ceremony, they would receive a refuge name—traditionally given as a reminder of who we fundamentally are, stripped of our conventional identity.

The afternoon before the ceremony, we set up an assembly line on low tables in the house where Pema was staying. Our job was to create the piece of paper that each person would receive with their refuge name written on it. It was an arduous and time-consuming process. Each name was first written by Pema in Tibetan calligraphy, then by one of us in English, and finally two seals were stamped in deep red on the bottom. Three of us sat on cushions at a low table. I was given the easiest job: stamping a simple lotus, pema in Sanskrit, under each name. Time dragged on. There must have been a hundred names, and we were exhausted and hungry by the time the end was in sight. The light was fading, and no one wanted to get up to turn on a lamp; we just wanted the ordeal to be over. Finally, we were down to the last one, waiting for the piece of paper with the name to emerge from Pema’s room when, for some reason, everything stopped. After a moment of sitting at attention, we all slumped down on our cushions, drifting off in the twilit room. I put my seal down on the table and rested. Then suddenly the last page was delivered, and we started up again. I picked up the lotus seal and stamped it hard on the page, and then, seal still in my hand, I saw in horror what I had done. I had stamped the lotus upside down.

I was going to have to go and tell Pema Chödrön that she had to pen the last name again.

Suddenly, I was five years old at Miss Ironsides School for Girls, and I was in trouble. My heart was pounding. There was no way out. I dragged myself up off the floor, clutching the messed-up paper, and knocked on Pema’s door. She was sitting at the end of a long dining room table in the dusky light, looking small and very tired. I hovered in the doorway, took a deep breath, and gave her the bad news. In my mind’s eye, I still see that moment when she looked up at me and daggers seemed to shoot from her eyes. Then, out of the blue, I blurted out, “I just want to be loved.” Time stopped, I just want to be loved hanging in the space between us. And then we both dissolved into laughter, and we laughed and laughed until finally we stopped, and Pema took a fresh sheet of paper from the stack and wrote out the last name one more time.

A day later, the meditation retreat was over, and it was time to get back to my life. As soon as I got back to Denver we would be leaving for our new home in the Wet Mountains. I felt stronger, armed with new insights and ready to confront the move, my fear, my numbness, and the big one, Joe and me. After twenty-two years, our marriage was struggling to survive; it needed a lot of work or a miracle to revive it.m description

The next morning, we woke up to a breezy, bright blue fall day, everything clear and fresh after the rain. “If you don’t like the weather in Colorado, wait five minutes,” was what the old-timers always said. I had hung a load of laundry on the line by the vegetable garden, and that afternoon I was out taking down the clothes. As I walked back to the house, I saw a white Toyota Camry driving slowly down the driveway. I waited by the porch, holding the laundry basket, to see who it was. The car came to a stop and a woman emerged from the driver’s side.

She was small and very thin, in her sixties, her brown hair cut into a bob at her chin, with bangs straight across her forehead. If she were a bird, she would be a finch, one of the brown and gray ones, unassuming and bright. She introduced herself—Berna Finley—and told me she had been born on the ranch and lived there for the first ten years of her life. She had just come from her home in Massachusetts to attend her mother, Angelica’s, memorial down in Florence.

“I didn’t really expect to see anyone here,” she said. “I just wanted to take a look. I have so many memories of this place.” I could see she was barely holding back tears. I invited her in for tea.

“This is very kind of you, I wouldn’t want to trouble . . . ,” Berna was saying as we came into the kitchen. She stopped midsentence, transfixed by the turquoise enamel cookstove. “Oh my,” she said, “it’s still there, right where it has always been.”

“It was definitely one of the selling points.” I smiled, putting down the laundry basket and filling the kettle.

“Before the outside was stuccoed, the wind would whistle through the walls,” Berna said, nursing her cup of tea. “That stove was a lifesaver. Of course, I also lost my eye when a live round went off in the coal bin. But that was later.” I had noticed one of her eyes looked odd, like a wandering eye.

I was mesmerized, listening to her talk, feeling the deep roots that connected her to the ranch. “My first love was a horse named Lindy,” she told me. “I rode all over this place on Lindy. It was a very sad day when we moved to Florence and I had to leave Lindy behind.”

“I have so many questions,” I told her. “Like are those your initials carved into the wall in the blacksmith shop?”

“That’s right, I carved them myself. BJ. Berna Jean is my full name.” She went silent for a moment. “Those were good years,” she added, looking sad.

“It’s nice to hear you talk about the ranch . . . your ranch. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that strong a connection. I can’t seem to figure out how to be here,” I confided in her. “There are moments when it makes sense. And then I feel lost. It’s kind of a seesaw.”

The afternoon had slipped away and the sun was getting low in the sky. Berna needed to get to

Denver to catch her flight to Massachusetts. “I am a writer by trade,” she told me. “Do you

know what Flannery O’Connor said about writing?” I shook my head. “I write to discover what I know.” Berna looked at me with her kind eyes. “That’s what I’m doing these days: writing some of my memories down. It’s helping me with the sadness. You could try it. You might find it helpful too.” She smiled and then added, “We could share our writings about the ranch.”

I felt a tingling in my body, that kind of tingling when you know something is right. I smiled at her. “That sounds just right, as long as you don’t read what I send.” She laughed and then, in a gesture strangely intimate and totally natural, she reached out and took my hand and held it for a long moment.

Before she left, we made a pact. She would send me reminiscences of her years growing up on the ranch and her heartbreak at having to leave. And I would send her writings about the ups and downs of my journey settling into my new home. It felt like the start of something real, a true connection.

A week later, her first piece landed in my inbox.

Hi Vicki,

Here, as promised, are some thoughts on our meeting last month:

The autumn air kisses my elbow as I pass the Wetmore Post Office, my eyes searching for familiar landmarks. I am driving to the ranch where I spent the first decade of my life. Sometimes the thought of coming here fills me with a sad longing and I close the doors to childhood memories. But today, still fragile from revisiting my mother’s death and her passionate love for this corner of the Wet Mountains, a strong feeling of at-homeness envelopes me.

The once washboard road is now paved and as smooth as the cloudless blue sky that hangs above. The landscape has changed hardly at all. And there are sights along this route that pull thoughts from the bottom of my mind where they have lain unexamined for more than half a century.

I steer the Camry around a sharp bend in the narrow road and without warning dead ahead is a gigantic bullet shaped rock shooting out of the hillside. “That’s it. Right there,” I hear myself yell, a five-year-old squished between my parents in the cab of their logging truck. Then I hear my mother’s voice tell me the story of the Indian boy and white girl who, forbidden to express their love for one another, climb to the pinnacle of the rock and jump hand-in-hand to their death. Fact or fiction, the legend of “Lover’s Leap” was my own sweet love story. Even now I feel little spasms of pain looking at the rock and imagining their plunge downward.

The hills fold around me as I near the ranch. I turn into the drive and stop in front of the house. The yellow tinged aspens, the creek, the rough stucco house, the soft breeze all stir sadness in my heart. A woman is standing in the yard, holding a laundry basket under her arm. Her name is Vicki and when she welcomes me with a smile and ushers me into the kitchen where that same old blue enameled stove still sits, I feel a hint of the possibility of healing the past. And for a moment, I feel I am finally home.

Yours truly, Berna

Learning the story of Lover’s Leap from Berna and following the trail of her feelings of sadness and fragility when she wrote about the ranch stirred something inside me. I felt a resonance with her experience of longing and grief and the desire to heal, as though I had found a soul sister.

That afternoon I went for a ride up a trail I had never ridden on before, along a small creek that meandered through an aspen grove near the road. The leaves had all turned and were beginning to fall. The ground was blanketed in gold. The afternoon sun flickered through the almost bare branches. I stopped for a moment in a clearing, letting Rain graze on a patch of grass. Closing my eyes, I listened to the slight rustling of leaves and the murmur of the creek. When I opened them, I was looking at a tree, illuminated by a brilliant ray of light. Two letters were carved in the trunk, cut deep into the bark, decades old: the letters V.H. My mind stopped. V.H. Victress Hitchcock. My initials. Here in this very spot.

Had somebody with those initials lived here? As soon as I got home, I turned on my computer and added that question to a piece I had started writing that morning.

Dear Berna,

It was so good to meet you and to get your email. I have been following your advice and writing. I just wrote this piece today:

These past few days, I am feeling the vastness of the space here, and how there is nowhere to hide. If I try to shut down, I run into an unbearable darkness inside. Then, I catch a glimpse of happiness, and I know that I have no way to get there except through the darkness, and I hesitate, perched on the edge, unable to jump.

Malidoma Some, an African healer, tells of a custom in his tribe. When a woman gives birth, she goes to a hut and all the children of the village are invited to surround her. As the baby comes out and utters its first cry, the children call out the baby’s name, welcoming it. This is how the newborn child knows it has arrived at the right place. Without that answering call, Some tells us, we can spend years in wandering, trying to arrive at where we are supposed to be.

Just this afternoon, riding Rain through a grove of aspen, I came upon an old tree with the gnarled initials V.H. perfectly carved into its trunk years ago by someone long forgotten. The shock of recognizing my own initials woke me up. I was struck by the thought that, in time, maybe I will feel welcomed here, that this is where I am supposed to be.

Do you know who might have had my same initials? I am so curious.

With warm regards,

Vicki

When Berna wrote back a few days later, she was unable to solve the mystery of the initials, and I realized how much I had been counting on her to make sense of it. Reality suddenly became shaky, and that afternoon I rode back down the trail into the grove to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating.

The afternoon light was flickering. The aspens were now completely bare, and the grove was redolent with the smell of leaves decaying into the earth. The tree was still there, the initials carved deep into its trunk.

The days of late summer were breathtaking. Joe’s vegetable garden was overflowing with squash and carrots and peas. The sun was warm during the day, with just a touch of cool in the air. Nights were cold, clear, and star studded. The space and the silence were all-pervasive. I could feel myself settling into a slower rhythm, finding it impossible to keep my usual frantic pace.

My whole life, ever since I could remember, I had been impatient. I got antsy slathering my body with lotion after a shower. Impatience was in my blood, a legacy from my mother and my grandmother. I decided this new, slowed-down world was a perfect place for me to practice patience. It was one of the six virtues Joe and I had recited as our wedding vow. With our new commitment to doing things differently it seemed like a good time to dust it off and give patience a try.

One afternoon on my way home from Florence, I pulled over by a stand selling Palisade peaches and, on a whim, bought a full box. That’s a lot of peaches. I decided as my first exercise in patience to peel them and can them. As a hippie, I had canned things; that’s what you did in the sixties. It couldn’t be that hard.I set the box down on the porch and, surrounded by buckets, I picked up my paring knife and started peeling. The peaches were a deep gold with splatters of rose in their hearts. For two hours, I peeled, peach juice dripping through my fingers, peach juice everywhere, my fingers aching. For two hours, I found myself on a battleground. On one side, my mind harped on about what a useless waste of time this all was; I could go to Safeway and get peaches for $1.25 a can. Then, the mind chatter would lift, and I would encounter a moment of pure joy—warm sun, blue sky, soft breeze, hummingbirds hovering. In the end, I abandoned the canning, made a peach pie, and froze the rest, but a start had been made and at least I had something to show for it.

My next project was staining the two pine rocking chairs we had found in the dim recesses of the unfinished furniture store in Canon City. Driving home with them, I had had a vision of sitting with Joe, rocking together side by side into our dotage. The next day, I set the chairs up on the porch and began staining and sealing them. It took a while for me to settle down, to not jump up and get a glass of water or smoke a cigarette, but gradually, as I moved the paintbrush back and forth slowly darkening the unfinished wood into a deep copper, I began to feel an unfamiliar sense of ease settle into my body. The sun was just dropping behind the mountain by the time I finished. “Look at what I just did,” I called out to Joe as he made his way out to the hot tub in his dressing gown, carrying a bottle of beer. He glanced over. “Nice,” he said, which was not as much appreciation as I was looking for, but I let it go.

It was my first hint that there might be an element of one-upping Joe or at least showing off in my patience project. That became clearer when I decided to tackle a project he had been putting off for days: stacking rocks in the creek to divert water into the pond. The week before, our neighbor from up the valley, Eustace, had arrived unannounced with fifty trout to dump into our pond. I guess it was a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift. He parked his big truck on the lawn, lumbered up the porch steps, and banged on the door. He was a large man; the buttons of his black shirt were popping open, his face beet red from the exertion of climbing the four steps to the porch. His accent was heavy Eastern European. He introduced himself, then pointed at the truck and said, “That’s my wife.” The woman in the truck didn’t look over. All I could see of her was a bouffant, peroxide-blonde head of hair. After his opening pleasantries, he said,“These are for your pond. They’ll need fresh water, ” and nodded toward a large tank in the back of the truck. I could see fish tails flapping. “I need your husband,” he added,and then he got in the truck, revved his motor, and drove across the lawn to the pond with Joe hurrying behind him on foot.

For days, Joe had put off dealing with getting fresh water into the pond for the fish and I was beginning to get worried we were soon going to find them belly up on its surface. It didn’t take long for me to regret my impulse to show Joe how diligent I could be. I bitched and moaned under my breath as I stacked rocks and dug into the black sludge and watched impatiently as the water pushed against the new wall, searching for a way through. Grumpily heaving rocks into the water, I told myself, Just think of it as weight training. Gradually the rock wall in the creek grew. After a while, the chatter in my head began to fade, and I became transfixed by one large rock lodged under the flowing water. “This is just the one I am looking for,” I said to the dogs who were hovering nearby, waiting for a stick to be thrown. Reaching into the icy water, I picked up the rock and placed it on top of the wall. Sweating and dirty, my sneakers soaked, I fell into a rhythm of picking up rocks and stacking them one by one. The wall grew larger and larger. The trickle of water kept searching for a way through until, all of a sudden, a full flow of burbling creek branched off and poured into the pond. I whooped and hollered and threw myself down on the bank, exhausted and laughing. The dogs joined the party and brought me sticks to throw into the pond over and over. I lay there for a long while warmed by the sun, intoxicated by the pungent smell of peppermint growing along the creek. I had definitely done something different, I had slowed way down, and it felt ridiculously good.

The next morning, I shared my struggles developing patience with Joe at what I had started calling our daily briefing. I began with the peaches and then the rocking chairs and then the grand finale at the pond. I could tell he was trying to be interested, but it wasn’t convincing. Maybe the minutiae of someone else’s torturous path of mind training was more than anyone should be asked to endure, but if I couldn’t share those moments with Joe, what could I share? That morning, Joe had nothing he wanted to talk about. The past few days, he had mostly complained—about the slowness of the internet, about his endless battle with the thistles in the meadow, about Rain having stuck his head in the window of his office and pushed a large box of nails off the ledge, scattering them all over the floor. It was hard for me not to laugh at that story, but I could tell Joe was struggling to find humor in anything. Something was eating at him, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I was trying not to get impatient with him, but it wasn’t easy.

I also needed to be patient with myself as I struggled to overcome my fear of riding alone at the ranch. Just thinking about riding Rain out into the wide-open space of the valley would set off an intense fear that grabbed me in the chest and migrated down to my belly, my teeth clamping shut. I found that chewing gum helped some, but soon I discovered the magic formula for calming my nerves was singing—one song in particular. Each day, I would bring Rain out of the corral, saddle and bridle him, get up on him, take a deep breath, and pop a piece of gum in my mouth. Then, as we took off, I would launch into “All of me, why not take all of me, can’t you see that I’m no good without you,” and gradually, I would start to settle into the saddle. It worked every time. Each day, we ventured a little farther on our expeditions. Then, late one morning, I decided to tackle riding across the creek. I was feeling confident. It was only a foot deep. I had watched Rain amble across it every day. What could go wrong? We headed toward the creek at a fast walk, got to the edge, and Rain stopped. He wouldn’t budge. I backed him up and started again. Same thing. “Never give up,” I heard Janice’s voice in my head. If you ask something of a horse, you can’t do anything else until they do it.” Again, I circled Rain around, we headed toward the creek again just fine, and then, at the edge of the water, he came to a halt. We sat for a while contemplating the valley on the other side. I tried again and then again. An hour went by. I started to panic. Were we going to be there until night? After one more attempt, I began to sing, my voice a whisper, “All of me, why not take all of me . . . ,” I felt myself start to relax. As I sang, I could feel Rain’s neck begin to soften. “Can’t you see that I’m no good without you.” I kept on singing, and then I nudged him with my legs and he took a step forward, and then, smooth as silk, he stepped into the creek. The sun sparkled on the water as we splashed across and climbed up the other bank. I gave Rain another nudge and he took off at a trot, gathering speed as we neared the hill. My mind was no longer in charge, criticizing me or trying to get me to do something different. I was just there, riding my horse across a wide mountain valley on a cool afternoon in autumn. Tired and happy, my body knew exactly what to do.

“Does Buddhism really help anything?” Kenny asked, squirming on his cushion. “Like our lives—does it really help in our lives?” He was struggling to express what was bugging him. “I guess I want to know, has it helped you, in your life?” He finally blurted it out. It caught me off guard. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. I knew that whatever I said had to be real.

By then, I had been coming once a week to the Camp for a year. Every week, the same four men would show up, sometimes joined by one or two others. In those many hours of sitting and talking and learning together, things had gotten pretty real. Each week, the edifice of denial and posturing we had all been hiding behind when we began had weakened, and our bullshit detectors had become finely tuned. I couldn’t wiggle out of Kenny’s question with a superficial answer.

“Not pulling any punches with that one, are you, Kenny?” I grinned at him.

“Nope.” He grinned back.

“The short answer is yes, it has helped me.” The group looked at me expectantly. “But I can see that probably won’t do it.” I went on. “Okay, how has it helped me, let me count the ways.”

I had to go slow, feeling my way through what I wanted to say. “I was a very unhappy teenager,” I started out. “I tried all the usual things to dull the pain—alcohol, drugs, slashing my wrists—none of them helpful. It felt as though everything I was being told about how life should be, how I should be happy—go to college, have a husband, kids, a nice house—was a lie. I always had a nagging feeling that there was something else, something more, some kind of freedom from my unhappiness, and it was that longing for freedom that got me to Buddhism.”

I looked around the group. Maybe freedom wasn’t the best word to have chosen, but there was no turning back. “I wanted to cut through the bullshit. And that’s what I found in Buddhism. A way to cut through the bullshit of always wanting things to be different, of doing the same things over and over that never made me happy. It gave me another way to look at things.” I sputtered to a close. “I guess that’s my answer.”

We all sat still. No one spoke.

Finally Kenny nodded and said, “It looks like you found it.”

“Thanks, Kenny,” I said.

“I know the feeling,” Matt added, “of wanting something different, not the same old anger, jealousy, over and over. My own bullshit always getting me in trouble.”

“Your mind, man, it’s your mind.” Kenny commented. I felt a certain pride welling up in me. We had talked so much about how our state of mind determined our reality. I could see how it was beginning to penetrate—all of us.

“So, how do you become a Buddhist?” Luis piped up.

“Is that something you all want to know?” I asked, not sure how far to go with the answer.

“I do,” Steve answered. The others nodded. Matt’s and Kenny’s comments gave me an idea. “Okay, so being a Buddhist means following a path of letting go of anger and jealousy and everything that keeps us hurting ourselves and others. It’s a gradual path.” Pretty feeble answer, I could tell.

“But is there something you do that seals the deal, where you sign on the dotted line?” Matt asked.

“There is a ceremony, called a Refuge Ceremony,” I said. I was relieved to have something tangible to talk about. “Not refuge like finding a place to hide out. It’s more like taking refuge in our own sanity, our own basic goodness, and developing trust in that.” I looked around the room. Everyone seemed lost in his own thoughts.

Luis finally broke the silence. “Is that something we could do? Take Refuge?”

Things were moving fast. I needed time to gather my thoughts. “Let’s talk about that next week,” I said. “We are almost out of time.”

Walking across the parking lot to my car, I could see that a winter storm was brewing. Gray clouds hung low over the mountains, the temperature had dipped down toward freezing, but I figured I had just enough time before the snow started for a visit to Rancho Loco.

Rain was happy to see me as I approached his stall with some carrots. I gave him a hug, let him out into the arena, and spent some time urging him to circle around me at a trot, then a canter first one direction and then the other. Then I stopped and waited for him to come toward me. I rubbed his forelock and then we backed up, side by side, and sprinted forward. Do-si-do your partner, sashaying around and around; it was a dance we both enjoyed. After an hour, I was winded, my face red and raw from the bitter cold. But my mind was clearer.

Dee was just pulling up as I walked to my car. I waved. “I can’t stop. Gotta get back before the snow gets bad.”

“Call me,” she answered, sliding out of her truck. “I’ll be in the office.”

As I drove, I could see the snow falling harder on the mountains. Reaching under my seat, I checked to make sure I had my car phone. Driving up the canyon, flakes were swirling around the Explorer, the spruce trees were blanketed in white, the black rock icy and glistening alongside the winding road. There was nowhere to pull over and turn around. I had to keep going. A couple of cars passed me going down to the plains. My heart started beating fast. After what seemed like forever, I made it to the intersection. By then it was dumping hard. I pulled over at the top of my road and called Dee. “I’m heading down 165.”

“Okay,” she said. “Call me when you get home. I’ll stay here. Go slow.”

It was eleven miles from the junction to the ranch, a trip that usually took twenty minutes, give or take. I peered through the swirling snow; the road was now snow-packed, one lane, a narrow tunnel between the verges piled high with snow on either side. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” I yelled, trying to shake off the fear that threatened to paralyze me. I knew I had to just dive in; the only alternative was to stay there and freeze to death. “Okay, let’s do this.” I sat up straight, put the Explorer into four-wheel drive, and let up on the brake. Clutching the steering wheel, praying that I wouldn’t run into any other lunatics coming up the hill, I entered a world now completely white. No evergreens. No rocks. No road. Nothing. Only snow, whirling, shooting straight at the windshield, falling and falling. It was mesmerizing and very frightening.

The car was moving at a snail’s pace, maybe eight miles an hour, but moving, the tires gripping the road. Gradually, my hands relaxed. There was nowhere to go but down through the tunnel. A calm descended on me. I realized that, even without seeing the road, I could still feel all the curves I had come to know so intimately.

After what seemed like hours, I could sense a dip in the snow on the right. I looked at the odometer. Eleven miles since the turnoff. It had to be the driveway. Holding my breath, I slowly turned the wheel to the right, slid down the hill, and stopped in front of what I imagined was the porch.

I had done it. I had driven home in a blizzard all on my own. I was euphoric and completely exhausted. Bronco and Abby had taken refuge on the blankets I had piled up for them in the lean-to next to the barn. They bounded over, crashing through the snow, whining and barking, and together we made our way up the stairs of the porch and fell in a heap inside. Lying on the kitchen floor, I surrendered to the wriggling mass of joy, wagging tails, tongues aimed at any exposed part of my body.

I could barely move. As I lay there on my back next to the old cookstove with my two dogs beside me, a Tibetan proverb I had once heard popped into my mind. “Wherever you receive love, that is your home.”

I struggled to my feet and called Dee. She picked up on the first ring. “I made it,” I said, smiling widely.

“You go, girl,” she answered, and I could feel her smile back at me across the snowy miles.

“Wherever you receive love, that is your home.” So simple and so true. This was my home, and I could feel the fear and sorrow at losing it percolating in my belly, ready to burst.