Friday, I drove from Manchester Center (Vermont) to New Durham (New Hampshire). The roads started looking familiar thirty miles before arriving on Birch Hill. This isn’t surprising: I lived on Birch Hill from seventh grade well into my college years. It’s been over thirty years since I called Birch Hill home, but it still feels like coming home whenever I’m on it.

Saturday, I made the drive from New Durham to Wareham (Massachusetts). Once the treads hit Route 24, I was in home territory. This isn’t surprising: I’ve spent the past twenty years there. It’s where my children grew up, and where my husband and I found life-giving work and play.

Today, I made the drive from Wareham to Manchester Center (Vermont). When I hit Route 11, the landscape and houses started looking familiar. I got a feeling of getting close to home. This is surprising: I’ve only lived in Manchester since mid-September. It’s where people will come to visit me, and where I will find life-giving work and play in the coming years.

I’ve had other places I’ve called home, and felt that same love deep in my bones when I drove back there. But I’ve never had that feeling of homecoming for three different places in a matter of a couple of days and a couple hundred miles. I can’t say why this moves me so, but it does. To find a single place in the world to call home is a blessing. I suspect finding more than one is catching a glimpse of this world’s true nature: holy and infused with love.

It’s been five weeks since I moved to Vermont, but I’ve spent almost half of that time elsewhere. Medical appointments, car troubles, and home improvements have returned me to Wareham more than I expected. It’s been wonderful in some ways, and frustrating in others – being pulled in more than one direction brings some difficulties even as it keeps me connected to more than one place. I’ve spent time with my sons and many friends, but I long to get settled into my new home. So I headed back to Vermont on Friday morning, via Lakes Region, New Hampshire; for an extra couple of hours travel time, I could drop in on my mother and sister in New Durham.

Getting from New Durham to Manchester Center takes almost the same amount of time as going from Wareham to New Durham – but it’s a shorter distance. There are major highways connecting SouthCoast Massachusetts to Lakes Region, New Hampshire, but not so much from New Durham to Manchester Center. It’s a lot of 35mph zones, sharp turns, and small towns. In typical New England fashion, you can’t get there(directly) from here.

My starting point was the same road that I learned to drive on, my ending point the town I now call home. Between the two, a few busy highways and a lot of back roads. Craft fairs, hiking trails, and town centers dotted the drive through the Fall foliage. Other than a brief pass by Manchester exits, I didn’t drive on any major routes. Many houses, few gas and radio stations. It took almost three hours to get from one small town in New Hampshire to another small town in Vermont.

Some might consider that a waste of time, going from one small place to another with no direct route in between. But I see it more as a metaphor for the spiritual life. There are no direct and easily identified routes, and there are many blind turns along the way. What seems like a road going nowhere is the only way to get from here to there. It takes time and effort, and it’s damn inconvenient at times. But that’s one of the major truths: convenience and speed aren’t the point or the destination. Getting home is.

In Wareham, it was cranberry bogs. Here in Manchester, it’s apple orchards. So when my son and his beloved decided to go apple picking yesterday, I went along. It was the perfect day for it – crisp air, blue skies, and foliage at its best providing the backdrop. Mad Tom’s Orchard in East Dorset had everything I could hope for – multiple varieties of apples, cider, and fresh cider donuts. The owners were friendly and informative, and the map of the orchard helpful.

Since this is my first Vermont apple picking experience, I picked enough to make Vermont applesauce. It’s my way of honoring the work of the local farmers and enjoying the fruits of their labors through Spring. It’s also my way of participating in the time-honored tradition of canning; it’s economical as well as an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

For many years, I canned cranberries – the local harvest where I lived for twenty years. Every time I opened a jar of cranberries, I was grateful for the place I called home. It was a wonderful way to be rooted in that seacoast community. Putting up applesauce will be more of a promise – a promise to claim this new place, and let this mountain town claim me as its own. Preserving is a statement: I’m not a tourist here. I’m a local.