I’m out on the porch when the call comes through. The local tractor dealership is on the line, letting me know that my new mower deck—a long-awaited upgrade—is being assembled and will be delivered in the next couple of days. I thank them by name, because by now they answer with Hey Emily, as if I’m an old friend. As I hang up, I picture the tall grass in my lower field that will soon feel the blade. That grass has grown so high it nearly reaches my knees; once it was an inconvenience, then it became a refuge for pollinators, and this evening, strangely, it’s all I can think about.

The back porch is where I do most of my writing, and dreaming. In the morning when I wake, I see the sunrises. In the evening, after a long day of work, creating, or dreaming, I am rewarded with a sunset as the sun sets between the mountains at the far end of the property. The late spring wind moves visibly through the tall grass, making the field ripple in little swirls like a green ocean under the afternoon sun. Each gust sends a wave rolling across the land; even the old farmhouse seems to lean a little into it, timbers gently creaking as if the house itself can feel the breeze. I close my eyes and let the breath of the wind pass over me too. In that shushing hush of grass and breeze, there’s a familiar whisper of freedom—something I used to chase in my daydreams as a child.

It’s been an expensive month, a season of investment in the things that Amelia and I need. I’m typing these words on a brand new MacBook Pro, bought to replace my trusty laptop that finally gave up the ghost. At my desk sits a custom-built gaming desktop tower, quietly humming—a powerful machine I ordered custom for the Windows-based multi-tasks, and occasional moments of recreation.

I also had to purchase a new mower to pull behind the tractor—an inevitability I saw coming. The last one, a finish mower that never truly measured up to the work I asked of it, had developed a nasty habit of throwing belts off the pulleys no matter how carefully I tried to finesse it. I gave it one last round of repairs, but the truth was, it had already given me everything it had. Letting it go came easier than expected. I listed it for free on Front Porch Forum, and the local fire warden showed up the very next day. We chatted for a bit, then I helped him load it onto his trailer.

Tomorrow I’ll drive into town to hand over a personal check for the mower deck I needed to replace on the tractor. The folks at the dealership won’t blink at that; they know my name, know my story, and trust that my word is good. In the same little Vermont town, the vehicle dealership across the street doesn’t hesitate to accept my check either—I’ve bought two trucks there, and Amelia’s Bronco Sport, and they’ve long since stopped asking for ID. There’s a warmth in this kind of recognition. After so many years of feeling like a stranger in my own life, I’ve become someone the local community knows by name.

Still, the turning of the calendar brings an old ache. It’s the time of year that once meant packing up for a journey away from home. The humid air and the scent of cut grass remind me of duffel bags and nervous excitement. I catch myself remembering the night before those summers of my youth, when I’d double-check a packing list and hug my pillow a little tighter, bracing for weeks in a world that I hoped might understand me, though never did. In my bedroom closet, on a shelf in the back, lives that same battered duffel bag I took with me the very first year I headed to those summer cabins. It’s the one I still had clutched in my hands the day I was kicked out at 16—the summer sky falling around me as I left that place for the last time. That bag hasn’t left this farm since the day I bought the property. It holds stories it will never tell, souvenirs of a self I had to outgrow to survive.

My back porch now is not so different from one of those old cabins where I spent my teenage summers. On warm days I fling the windows wide open and let music pour out, the same songs that once got me through long nights in my younger days. I sit here with my notebook, and listen to the wind, the birds, and the rain, against the sound of the rushing river behind me. The wooden planks under my feet, the screens rattling softly in the breeze, even the scent of the air after a rainstorm—it all brings back echoes of distant afternoons, of sunlit dust motes dancing in cabin light. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can almost imagine myself back there, a lanky, hopeful kid scribbling poems in a spiral notebook, believing for a moment that the summer could last forever.

But pieces of me are forever trapped in that earlier time, in that sunlit cabin of memory that I can visit only in dreams. I know I can’t truly return to the person I was or the place where it all stopped. That world is inaccessible now—closed off by ignorance and difference, by the people who couldn’t accept what they knew all along, though in the end, didn’t understand. The door to that past life is locked tight, and even if I could turn the knob, I’m not sure I’d recognize the girl who remains on the other side. She is frozen there at twenty, sitting on the edge of a bunk with her arms around her knees, eyes closed against the hurt. I feel her sometimes, a ghost in the rooms of my memory.

When I was young, I spent more time with a notebook and a camera than with any living soul. I see her now in my mind’s eye: that younger me, forever the observer, wandering the edges of the soccer field or the lakefront with a camera slung around her neck, jotting down secrets, and sorrows in a dog-eared journal. Those were the truest companions of my youth, and were there for me when I struggled to speak. I think that’s how I learned to feel visible: by writing myself onto pages, and collecting moments in photographs, I claimed a corner of the world that felt real, and mine.

I open my eyes now to the golden light stretching over the farm. The tall grass is glowing, swaying in slow waves as the sun sinks lower. By next weekend, that grass will finally be back to normal; the new mower deck will see to that. I’ll cut paths through the green expanse, and the field will transform back into something familiar and tame. And yet, I know that underneath the fresh-cut order, the wildness will still be there—the wildflowers will root deeper, the monarchs and bees will return when it’s time. Just like me, this land has its cultivated surfaces and its untamed depths. Just like me, it remembers what it’s been through.

I linger on the porch steps as evening comes on. The air is cool and carries the scent of damp earth and the last of the apple blossoms. My worries fall at my feet, and a gentle hush falls across the fields. I realize I am content here in a way that the young girl I was could barely imagine – content, safe, and free. The past hasn’t vanished; it lives in me, in the soil under my nails and the scars on my heart, in old duffel bags and weathered notebooks. But every day I get to choose what to carry forward and what to lay to rest. Tonight, as the wind moves through the tall grass like a lullaby, I carry the lessons and let go of the pain. I watch the phantom waves roll across the fields in the twilight, and I whisper a thank you—to the land, to the wind, to the girl I used to be.