It was the juniper that lined the driveway. I didn’t know. I had always thought it was just what summer in Maine smelled like until my parents planted some last week by their front door here in Massachusetts and I smelled it again. Confirmation. Like I have solved some sort of lifelong mystery.
Yet in so doing, the magic cracked apart a bit and there is nothing left but a prickly ground cover in a slightly blue shade of green.
But that’s what magic is I guess, a mystery that, until revealed, allows for even the singular possibility that life can spoon up charm and enchantment all on its own. That when we don’t know to call it “juniper”, it is instead a scent on a breeze, so delicious and nurturing we don’t have any need to name it; it just is.
Memories of my summers. When the wicked willies of winter and school and social anxiety were discarded along the Maine Turnpike, gone by the time the family car exited hard right to Scarborough. My body knew it belonged in that juniper breeze, my bare feet bouncing off the driveway that was too hot hot hot to bear, soothed at once by the soft pine back porch. The screen door slapped clapped behind me, no time to spare. Granny’s arms were waiting. Magic.
It was her house. Always. Rules made and broken under her matriarchal watch. Most fun when she broke them herself. When we would eat dinner at the breakfast table in our shorts rather than our skirts or when we played dress-up-fashion-show by rummaging through her formal closet. Summer freedoms– true for all of us I suppose.
It’s not something I can get back. I can only retrieve the memories and wonder how to recreate that same sense of place and space. A place I know I belong. What home should be after all; that magical place where we belong.
Maybe that’s the trouble we run into as adults. That we try to name and then (re) create what we once had, forgetting that enchantment has to find us. That charm is more than we can ask of it or name. Magic is what we wander into. If we wrench any of it into purpose, to make it true, to be in some kind of control, it falls apart as easily as a sandcastle built at low tide.
Just planting bushes in the yard isn’t going to do the trick, but I’d like to think that people hire us because we know that they are chasing their juniper breeze. I hope so. Because we are chasing ours. And twenty-five years in, I can tell you with certainty, trusting the magic is the best part. We help build those homes where kids and grandkids can gather and be themselves and feel like they belong. The ones where the magic isn’t named but rather shows up in the most unexpected ways.
May your summer be filled with charm and enchantment.
Allison
