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Pine.
There’s a long winding driveway, gravel, dirt, pine trees, any trees, pretty thick along both sides. Maybe deer and rabbits, foxes and badgers and birds all living in those woods. There’s a stream, maybe somewhere along the line it becomes a river, fish and everything else like that.
At night there’s no light pollution, so you can see every star and galaxy above, and during the day you can’t see any other houses or anything. At the end of the driveway there’s an old stone cottage, wouldn’t be more than a couple of rooms, real wood fire, small windows, big enough that during the day you can see, but not so big that in the winter it gets too cold.
There’s nothing there but time, time and me and the dog and the cat and just peace.
Maybe this place is real somewhere. For me, it is not. It exists purely in my mind, changing how I need it to at any moment. But normally it stays the same. I miss it, having never been it can be strange, but it is what it is. It doesn’t have to be real, not everything has to be.
I think it’s fair to say I do pine for this place, life, way of being. But like the pages of an unwritten book it has not yet come into being, or maybe more like a book somewhere on a dusty shelf, it’s waiting.
Maybe whoever is already there is finding the simplicity of joy there already. One day I hope to join them. Maybe they are me. Maybe I’ve been them all along.
