The first April

"In my Father's house there are many dwelling places."* — John 14:2

I was looking out the kitchen window this morning at the yard and the fence and the barn and the field beyond, and I was remembering the first April.

We moved here in March of 1979 and the house was cold and the yard was mud and the barn had a leak in the roof that Earl said he would fix that weekend and fixed three weekends later, and Becca was two and the other two were not born yet, and the house was not this house. It was the house we had bought, which is a different thing from the house we lived in, which is a different thing from the house I live in now.

The first April was the one that told me.

I had been inside all month because March in the Shenandoah Valley is not spring, it is mud with opinions, and the house was small to me in those weeks — not the square footage, which was more than we had ever had, but the walls, because I had not yet put anything on them and they were someone else's walls in someone else's house and I was a young woman standing in a kitchen that did not feel like hers.

And then April came and I went out the back door one morning because Becca was asleep and I wanted coffee on the porch and the yard was green. Not coming green. Not starting green. Green — all at once, the way it happens here, where you go to bed in brown and wake up in a yard you have not seen before.

There were daffodils I had not planted along the fence by the barn. There was a dogwood in the side yard that had not been there the week before, or had been there and I had not been awake enough to see it. There was a line of volunteer mint coming up along the foundation that someone had planted ten years before me and that would come up along the foundation every April for the rest of my life and does still, and I have never once planted it or pulled it or done anything at all except step over it on the way to the garden.

The house told me that morning that it had been here before I came and would be here after I left and that I was welcome to live in it in the meantime.

I have been living in it in the meantime for forty-seven years.

Jesus says in my Father's house there are many dwelling places, and I have turned that sentence over a thousand times and the meaning that comes to me this morning is the simplest one: a dwelling place is not a house you bought. It is a house that took you in. The daffodils were here. The mint was here. The dogwood bloomed without anyone asking it to. And I stood on the back porch with my coffee and my sleeping daughter and my husband who was going to fix the barn roof three weekends from now, and the place said *stay*, and I stayed.

Lord, this house has been my dwelling place. I did not build it. It built me.