They called it Gilbert’s Hill, the place I grew up. I used to trudge my way to the highest point of the mound of well-churned earth, moss and roots just to see the entire world.

My entire world, big John’s junky barnyard, the McPherson’s dirtbikes, Mrs. Frickatitch and her yappy little dogs and the place I called home. My yellow-bricked castle with cherry maple floors, the kind you could get a good slide out of with the right socks on. Never thought I’d miss that place but I do, not just the sights, but the smells, rotting black walnuts, the Beverly swamp and burning brush.

It was one hundred and thirty acres of vastness, mostly swamp but some cash crop fields, the terrain was hilly and trying, but it was the land of my ancestors, a long line of farmers, breaking their backs to avoid being broke. The farmer’s life was never easy, for anyone. There was proof of their existence in the landscape, broken pieces of pottery under a thin layer of grass near the swamp and a handmade stone fence from years of picking rocks from the unforgiving fields. I imagined their calloused hands stacking each rock, the formation almost appearing calculated spelling patience and peace with the balanced structure.

The swamp seemed endless in those days, civilized by a path the size of a horse-drawn cart. It still murmurs within me, radiating the buzz of the ever-present tiny creatures that never met the eye but only caused a ripple in the millions of little ponds mossied and slimed. It was clean, despite its greened and molded facade, the same colours as the veins pulsing through me. Trees rich with moss on colder northern sides, and dried to crisp on the south. I learned the ways of the sun, the wind, the water in that place. Thickets and marshes and every place in between, untouched but seen but young swampy eyes.

But I didn’t need evidence of their existence, I felt my ancestors when I walked through the tall hay as it brushed against my palms. I thought about their sweat and blood that soaked into the earth, I heard their voices in the wind, their laughter on the tin roof in the barn in a midsummer rain.

Summers, the season of golden glory. Alfalfa growing wild, sweet and free, soles of feet permanently grass-stained, hair knotted and mangled as the ever-growing ivy gripping at the yellow bricks. Lilac and Walnut trees surrounded the house concocting a sweet aroma of citrus and florals. We ran around in our bathing suits, my sister and I. White blond and crazy, screeching like wind, we ran, and rolled and jumped and cartwheeled on every inch of the land.

We liked the way our feet felt in the cold mud and the way the warm breeze felt on our sunburnt skin. The farm was a vessel for our imaginations, and it showed. Every low hanging branch bark-stripped bare from little hands and feet crawling and gripping, every puddle filled with a lovely concoction of leaves and mud, we specialized in nature soup. Two queens of trampolining, sledding until it was dark, and rubber boots, it was our kingdom.

Winters were harsh, the icy wind blew through cracks in the foundation, wool socks were worn to bed and the fireplaces were fed for months, it always smelt like smoke and sticky pine. The pond at the end of the lane froze over, if we were lucky, we’d get off the school bus to find mom, shovelling the blue-grey surface, gearing up for a game. Ginny and I would sit in a snowbank on the edge of the frozen footprint-shaped pond and eat doritos and snow until our feet were frozen. It was a beautiful way to spend a winter, cooped up, the only thing we had to our names was each other.

I had four siblings, each strong and capable in their own way. The oldest, Carla was practically a mother by the age of twelve, she shopped while mom flipped through a magazine in the grocery store. The second girl, Jeannie, blue-eyed, gap-toothed and freckled, sang like a songbird, a melody maker. Stanley, my brother was in the middle of it all, found his way through a banjo and survived on apples, and bags upon bags of milk. The youngest after me was rosy-cheeked and runny-nosed, Ginny, and she was the best companion a kid like me could have asked for.

My mother grew up not a mile from Gilbert’s Hill, a decent-sized property with a lovely barn and acreage with integrity. Grandpa lived there while we were growing up, as did his father and the father before that. Seven generations of my lineage worked those lands until they ended up in them. Grandpa would tell us the stories of his childhood, only getting electricity at the age of eighteen, he’d tell tales of the farm, about his cat named Chummy and his loyal workhorse Maude.

He was the one who told my parents about Gilbert’s Hill. It was a Sunday, as my Dad recalls, Grandpa called and told them about a farm for sale. It was owned by a pair of brothers, Ham and Wes, my fathers great uncles. Mom and Dad packed up the car with the “big kids”, the older three, and went for a drive to see it.

It was in quite a state when they first saw it, only two men lived there for the past twenty-some years, and grass was growing out of the floorboards. On clear cold nights, you could see the stars through the battered roof tin while lying in bed.

They showed my parents the bedrooms upstairs, and when they got to the end of the hall there was a small room, only the size of a mere closet, they called it a nursery, something my mother said their family of five would never need again.

This was before I was born, before all hell broke loose.

They bought Gilbert’s Hill in September. I was born the next year. Mom says she remembers the soybeans in the field were brown, but not yet harvested. The paint in the house drying on the walls was making her sick, she didn’t know why she felt so crummy, until she took a test and it said positive. She stared out at the soybeans full of fear and the first thought this universe had of me.

I was bathed in the sink where we washed the vegetables that grew in the garden. There are photos of me, green eyes, fluffy red hair, naked and chubby with a grin similar to the one I have today. According to my eldest sister, however, I would cry, not like a regular baby, but all hours, every day, every night. Sometimes I wonder if I knew of this grieving before it came along, like some kind of message got through to me warning me of what was to come.

As a kid, I was quiet. Even though there was always someone around, I felt alone. Inhabiting the old nursery, my dad painted the purple walls brown and green, as per my request. It was only big enough for a twin bed and dresser. At night, I would hear the bats squeaking in the attic and the old lilac tree creaking in the wind outside my window. It was spooky, but it was mine; that was all that mattered.

Silence was, and still is, my greatest virtue. The house was always full of sound, voices, music, or a dog barking, my childhood sounded like a dishwasher being unloaded and felt like a spincycle. Hair was always everywhere, mud ironically filled the mudroom, the dishwasher and washing machine, never, ever stopped. We were always late to every event, leaving the driveway with the gravel flying, dogs chasing us down the lane. I can picture Mom doing her lipstick in the passenger seat mirror, looking at me through it, just a quick glance was a moment in her spotlight.

We ate around the table for every meal we were home, Mom worked her ass off and so did the stove. I don’t remember much about the food, but there was always a bag of milk at dinner and it was constantly being spilled, mainly by the youngest, Ginny.

Our dining room table, wooden and worn, sun soaked and saturated was once a tree in the forest from the past. It was marked and etched by the reeded edge of a quarter, we carved our names in it, when we didn’t even know what they meant yet. Dad sat at the head after work, all alone eating our scraps, and now the table sits alone, like dad, growing mold and collecting dust.

I was grown now, hair long and changed from white-blond to something of burnt autumn. I remember the for sale sign, like someone drove a stake into the ground at the side of our humble road, marked with a price on childhood. I remember the low murmurs and the adult conversation. It was never the same after leaving, the sweaty day in September when I said goodbye to our plot of history, our slice of sky.

I looked at everything once, as if to study it, remember it, to bring it back to me one day. Flashes of fence lines, rusty barbed wire, the sound of the crickets in the dark, would never be the same as the real thing.

That is the thing about home, that we all have a sip of it, at one time or another, and then we scrounge and search the entirety of our lives for a feeling like it again. An essence of the warmth of the fires or the smell of the black walnut, the sweetness of hay. The dew-soaked soles of my once soft, little feet, falling asleep to the sound of a family in a saturated room with a hearth crackling and voices trailing.

If I could have one more time, one more breath, one more feeling of sleeping in my mother’s arms, then maybe, just maybe, I would be whole again.

“You don’t have a home until you leave it, and then when you have left it, you can never go back.” James Baldwin.