The homeplace rune

We don't write our stories so much as they write us. With valient effort and attention to detail, we can edit them a bit. Some say we already wrote them between lifetimes, and wrote them the way they are as lesson plans for the next school in session.

There is a rune debate that involves the order of the final two runes, Dagaz and Othala -- or Othala and Dagaz. Dagaz is transformation and Othala is home (and all that implies).

Note: The runes have an order to them -- which is why most Runesters think Ralph Blume sucks. He created a new order to the runes -- it's like putting the middle of the story first. I read a book last week that started with the ending. It was crafted well, so I didn't mind. Things are circle, anyway. Runes form a circle. It's just that within that circle, there is a time-tested pattern of evolvement. From Fehu to... the final two runes. The final two runes have traded places at times. Freya Aswynn didn't make that change, but she brought it forward to the rest of us. I first learned the runes by way of Freya's work, so I put Othal before Dagaz.

Later, I switched these two back to the more usual, transformation and then home.

It matters.

And I still don't know which is right.

I know I had a lot of transforming to do before I came the circle back home again. And I've a lot more to do now. Dagaz -- Othala -- Dagaz

Came the equinox, 2010 and I paid a virtual visit to the old homeplace. I walked it in my daydream and either I called to the land or the land called to me, but by the time of secular Easter, my husband picked up on the call. He suggested we go up on the hill.

We'd been there before to visit, but this time I saw things I haden't seen. "Suddenly", Mom's beech tree was back. And the old porch floor was visible under a couple inches of earth and moss. When I saw the beech tree, I got the message. But those kinds of messages don't have words and I didn't know how to verbalize what I was seeing.

Backstory: There was a beautiful old beech tree over a wellhouse. When Mom was a kid (She was born in 1911), her aunt and uncle lived in the house and she'd go visit. She'd sit out on the edge of that wellhouse and look up through the brances of that beech.

In 1960, when we lost our home down at edge of the city limits where the road turned from cobblestone to dirt, Mom worked herself a bit of practical magic (necessity and determination) and managed to lasso that place -- or the piece of paper that allowed her the ownership she already carried in her dreams.

We lived there from the time I started school until the year I went to seventh grade. We moved that summer to Youngstown, Ohio. I kept trying to come home again. Nearly made in in 1974.

Of course, the house was gone by then and the beech tree had been cut down long ago. Mom's Beech tree. Mom's homeplace.

Which she gave it to me.

She made that legal when I married and signed it to the both of us.

And we bought a farm and lost a farm and lost the homeplace with it. And I mourned my loss -- which was a deep loss -- and got on with day to day. But I never stopped looking for the replacement -- a piece of land of my own. I can't abide in cities for long. I like to go visit -- (Asheville, NC is my favorite) and I like to come home again.

But I had no home to come to.

We eventually landed a house. It's sweet-natured and I can doll it up when I want to. I planted an herb garden and he's got a workshop.

But I was still lighting my candles for a "homeplace". Still looking -- and nothing I looked at was quite right. Long, long, long story I'm going to skip. Just cut to the chase, here.

Things tumbled into place this spring and we bought the old homeplace back again. It had not been for sale. Several of the folks who live up that way had been trying to buy it - one even approached the new owner a few weeks before we did. But he didn't sell it. "I guess I'll just hold on to it for awhile..."

And then we asked him.

And he sold it to us.

I'm home when I'm there. My husband feels the same way. We'll build a house there sometime. Right now, we go there and listen to the place. And we admire the beech tree. There's a filled in well down under there somewhere -- a hand-dug, stone-lined well.