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.

Winter came early that year with a fierce and unrelenting blizzard that blanketed the valley for four days and stacked up four feet of snow against the house. It arrived halfway into September while I was filming in Denver, and I missed it. I had just rented the old cabin to a woman who was planning on spending the winter at Lookout Valley Ranch on a solitary meditation retreat. She was there alone, and the storm was so sudden and so relentless that she had been trapped in the main house for three days.

When I arrived home, the sun had turned the driveway into a river and the corral into a large mud puddle. As I parked my car, I saw the cabin door was open, and the renter was hauling all her belongings out to a friend’s truck. She could barely hold still long enough to say “hello” and “I’m leaving.”

After the storm, everything settled back into full-on Indian summer. But the storm gods had worked their magic at just the right moment. I had begun questioning whether I wanted to have someone else living on the place full time, someone who might need taking care of. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I saw the truck with the last candidate pull out of the driveway. I was beginning to feel how much I needed to be alone to understand what I was feeling, to be able to relax, to loosen the vice grip of trying to attend to everyone else. I needed time by myself to unravel. The good news was that living on a ranch in the Wet Mountains, it took some effort to connect with people.

Otis and Johanna were my closest neighbors, and they were only there on weekends. That suited me just fine. By the weekend, I was ready for some company. I loved sitting in their living room amphitheater watching the Broncos and drinking beer. Or if the spirit moved me, I would cook up some pasta and invite them over. We could keep up a free-flowing conversation for hours. Sometimes Otis would tell stories of his years working in the steel mill. Hot, grueling work, thirty-two hours straight, week after week, coming home and sleeping and going back to work, entire childhoods of his son and daughter missed. He had retired on disability five years before and wore a back brace, but I never heard him complain about the toll it had taken on his body. Meanwhile, I saw every bump in the road of my emotions as a major earthquake, daily monitoring my intake of St. John’s wort and vitamin B and fish oil to try to keep my system running smoothly. I couldn’t imagine living with the level of stress and exhaustion that had been Otis’s natural habitat.

The weekend after the big storm, I asked Otis and Johanna over for a dinner of burgers and potato salad. As I dished out the food, Johanna launched into politics, her favorite topic. A lifelong Democrat, she was thrilled to have Bill Clinton take over from George H. W. Bush. “I’d rather have a president like John Kennedy who can’t keep it in his pants than a sanctimonious warmonger like Bush,” she pronounced. Otis sat, settled, filling up the wooden kitchen chair, beaming at everything she said.

When I told them about the renter bolting, he commented, “Life up here ain’t for the faint of heart.” I couldn’t tell if he was including Joe in that observation, but I felt a tinge of satisfaction at being the one who hadn’t bolted.

Looking in any direction, it was impossible to avoid the truth that life in the Wet Mountains was not for the faint of heart. Every story I heard was another confirmation. Dee had started working as a dog catcher in the foothills around Canon City. She told me stories of encampments of survivalist families, with ragged children, no more than four or five, roaming shoeless in the trees and packs of pit bulls chained to stakes around the camp. She would get a haunted look in her eyes as she described the rescue scenes, standoffs with armed crazies ranting as the police handcuffed them while she loaded the horses, goats, dogs, and cats into trailers and drove them to the pound.

One day, Jasmine stopped by with her daughter, Jenny, and her friend, a tiny, wispy blonde girl with legs so skinny I could have circled each one with my hand. I thought she was four, but Jasmine told me she was eight. Her name was Rebecca. “Her mom is not doing well,” Jasmine told me. “She needed a break.”

“Not doing well how?” I asked. The story was long and convoluted, but the gist of it was that she had fibrous cysts in her uterus and no money for treatment, which she wouldn’t have agreed to anyway because she didn’t believe in doctors. “God is my doctor and my insurance,” she told Jasmine.

Rebecca barely spoke. She flinched when I accidently dropped a cup on the floor. But by the end of the afternoon, she and Jenny were lying on their bellies in the attic drawing pictures of horses on large sheets of paper. When they left, I invited her back, and the next time Jasmine came to ride, Rebecca and Jenny came too. That visit, she curled up next to me on the glider, and we read Where the Wild Things Are, a favorite from my kids’ childhoods. She told me she had no books at home. Then, a week later, when Jasmine and Jenny came by, she wasn’t with them. “Rebecca couldn’t come?” I asked.

Jasmine shook her head. “She can’t come anymore,” she said. “She’s not allowed.” We were standing out by the corral, watching Jenny feed apples to the horses. “I don’t know what got her mom mad,” Jasmine continued. “She yelled at me that she didn’t want Rebecca to go to the house of a Satanist anymore.”

I stared at her. None of it made any sense. “A Satanist? Because of Where the Wild Things Are?” I asked.

Jasmine shrugged. “For her, that’s anyone she doesn’t agree with,” she said, and handed me a rolled-up piece of paper. “It’s from Rebecca, poor little munchkin.”

After they left, I sat down on the glider, unfurled the paper, and read the words scrawled on the top of the page: “The mos fun I am havin tis sumer is wit my fren at miz vici’s hose. i luv it here.”

The rest of the page was filled with a drawing of a pale yellow house, and standing in front, a tall woman with wild hair wearing jeans and a shirt with many different colored lines, flanked by a big brown horse and two gray-speckled dogs. In the bottom corner, almost falling off the page, was a tiny child with wispy yellow hair, wearing a yellow polka-dot dress.

I put the paper down next to me on the glider, my heart aching. Why did I feel such a strange kinship with this child? I had been a thin, blonde, sad child, but I was never smacked, or deprived of books, and even though my parents may not have been loving, they weren’t crazy.

It felt like I was living in an incomprehensible world. A world of opinions I would never understand. A world where it was easy to see how people, pushed to the edge, made bad choices and got trapped in narrow, crazy views.

Then, as if there weren’t enough sorrow for one day, that evening an email arrived from Berna. It had been over a week since her visit to the doctor to check on her cough. The message was short. It was just what I had been hoping to high heaven it wouldn’t be.

Dear Vicki

Well, the news was not good. I wasn’t really expecting it to be. But for someone who has never smoked, it was hard to fathom hearing I have quite advanced lung cancer. I am proceeding with a treatment plan which looks ominous, but with a team of very sensitive and caring physicians, nutritionists, nurses, etc., etc. I feel hopeful and as good physically as I have in the past several months—which today is quite good. I must admit I haven’t done much serious writing since all this came up except for a factual journal. But I am still working on the Charlie Bragg piece. Will be in touch.

Luv, Berna

As I crawled under the covers that night, I felt I was carrying a weight of unfathomable sorrow—for Berna, for Rebecca, for the world of confusion and fear in which I was living. It was a long, sleepless night.

The next morning, fog was pouring up the canyon and traveling through the valley like a snake. Then the rain started. Sheets of rain blurred the view from my office window. The wind whistled around the house. I sat in the dim corner of my office, my mind filled with thoughts of Berna. I opened her email and read it again. Her message had that unadorned style I had come to know in her letters. She didn’t want to concern me. But her heart shone through, and I could sense her worry. I wrote her a short encouraging note and decided I wanted to follow up with a real card, which meant driving to Westcliffe.

I felt like I was moving in slow motion, an exaggerated pantomime of mindfulness—turning off the computer, straightening the pen next to it, pushing my chair back, standing up. The dogs barking wildly put an end to the strange charade.

A truck had pulled up outside. I could see it was the San Isabel Electric meter reader come for his annual visit, which meant another big bill was about to land on me. The meter reader was an older man, short and lean, wearing a well-worn cowboy hat and boots. He was standing by the pole staring at the meter when I came out. “Howdy, ma’am,” he said. I nodded and smiled, steeling myself for the bad news. “Have you been living here this past year, full time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well then, the meter must have broken down some time ago. It’s telling me you used a lot less power this year than last year.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked. I was working up a head of steam about how it wasn’t my fault the meter didn’t work, when the man said, “As far as I’m concerned, nobody at the head office needs to know you were living here full time.” He smiled and looked me in the eye. “You have a good day, now.”

“Thank you,” I said, pulling myself together and smiling back. “You just made my day.” And I meant it.

All the knots of sorrow for Berna and Rebecca and the righteous indignation at the San Isabel Electric and the rest of the uncaring world evaporated in an instant. The rain had stopped. I grabbed my keys, told the dogs to take care of the place, and took off for Westcliffe.

As I drove slowly down Main Street, it was easy to tell that summer was over. There were parking spots everywhere. At Jennings Market, the woman at the cash register didn’t bother asking if I wanted paper or plastic. It felt good that she recognized me as a local and loaded up my few supplies in a plastic bag.

I found a card at the corner store and wrote a short message to Berna. After dropping it at the post office, I couldn’t think of anything more to do so I headed home.

Driving out of town, I felt my whole being as wide open as the valley I was driving through. One side of the vast sky was gray, with lightning. The other a brilliant blue. The sadness had washed through me, and there was nothing on my mind. It felt good.

Winding down the canyon, I could see Singing Acres Ranch coming up on my left. An old truck was parked in front of the log house and a short, stocky, middle-aged woman with hair that looked like she had taken pruning shears to it was unloading boxes from the back. Without thinking, I pulled in behind her, got out, and introduced myself. “Come on in,” she said in a gruff but not unfriendly manner. “I’m Margaret.”

The house was small and dark, the living room filled with old leather armchairs and books and antlers. The place smelled of wood smoke. Margaret dropped the box she was carrying onto the floor and ushered me into the kitchen area. Chunks of raw meat were stacked on a wooden table next to a large meat grinder. “Shot him last week,” Margaret said, nodding at the meat. “I’m making ground elk for the winter. Have you ever had an elk burger?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Good and good for you,” she said and poured us each a cup of thick black coffee from a percolator sitting on the cookstove. Nodding at a chair next to the table, she told me to have a seat and said she had to keep going, but I was welcome to stay. I sat down.

We talked for an hour or more as Margaret cranked the handle on the grinder churning out ground elk meat. She told me how she and Clara had met working as counselors at a Girl Scout Camp in 1958. “Clara’s the real horsewoman—she grew up in a family of Kansas ranchers. I came from Oakland.” She laughed. Over the next few years, working as schoolteachers in Kansas, they dreamed up the idea of buying a ranch in Colorado and breeding Appaloosa horses. Listening to Margaret tell the story of how they made this dream happen, two women in 1965 with very little money, made our journey to Lookout Valley seem like a stroll down the Champs-Élysées.

“How did you even come up with the idea, much less make it happen? I bet there were a few men along the way who thought you couldn’t do it.”

Margaret chuckled and nodded. “We got asked a lot of questions . . . there was a lot of skepticism, would be the polite way to say it. People asked why the hell would we do such a thing. And we would always say: ‘Because we wanted to.’”

I couldn’t stop smiling at the stories, the place, the piles of elk meat, the ease of being with Margaret. There was so much I wanted to know, so many questions about how they made it work, but the light was fading and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. “Come back anytime,” Margaret said as she stood in her doorway and waved goodbye. Her last words were, “You’re going to do just fine down there.” I coasted on those words all the way home.

It had been a couple of long and full days. I needed time alone to let it all sink in. I grabbed a beer and went to the backyard. Dropping my jeans and shirt on the ground, I climbed into the hot tub and, sinking into the warm bubbling water, I lay back, held by the tree-covered hills surrounding me and the pale gray sky above slowly settling into darkness.

“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.