My father taught me to look for daffodils. He said that if you see them in bunches somewhere out in the country it’s a sign that there used to be a homeplace there. Out at the farm last week, I was reminded of it when I saw clusters of slender green leaves standing straight up out of the winter ground topped with bright yellow trumpet-like blossoms around the old Kennedy house. That house is no longer visible from the road since the wildness has had its way. The last of three Kennedy brothers died years ago, and my Dad bought the place, but the little old country house wasn’t enough to keep up, and now it’s slowly sinking beneath the gradual rise of growing pines and shrubs. The daffodils still bloom. I imagine they will be blooming a hundred years from now. 

Elsewhere on the property you can find the little flowers in clumps where no other sign of a house remains at all. Somebody put up walls and a roof here, sat around a table, cursed and blessed, prayed and loved, maybe raised children a hundred and fifty years ago, most certainly lost children, too. But there’s no trace left, except for these daffodils. They have clung to the earth here to bear witness, to mark with their candle-like blooms the lights long extinguished from this place.

So, there are the daffodils. Another thing I was told to look for are old wagon paths worn deep into the earth from travelers long ago. Robert Macfarlane identifies a similar phenomenon in the introduction to his little book “Holloway” saying, 

“They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Like creases in the land, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to the other old paths and tracks in the landscape – ways that still connect place to place and person to person.” 

Macfarlane says later that “paths run through people as surely as they run through places.” That must be true out here at the farm. I walked down the wagon road a few days ago. It is cut three or four feet below the plane of the land on either side. At some point in the past this way must’ve known a lot of traffic. Wheels, hoofs, feet. Feet attached to real people with voices, names, hopes, disappointments, laughing faces, healthy ones, sick ones. Real people who had made their way from the east coast when the middle of Mississippi was to their minds the West. This land, where there must’ve been a small community, is still somewhat wild, rural, out of the way and only reachable by red dirt roads that wash out pretty easily if much rain comes. 

I’ve never followed the wagon road, that hollowed out way, as far as it goes. I don’t know where it ends. I’m not really sure where it originally began. I’ve been far enough down it to visit the cemetery. My Dad found it, of course. He knows every inch of this place, nearly every tree, certainly every path (many of which he’s made himself), creekbed, and bounding line. This is a region keeping memory of many kinds. Hidden, buried, blooming, hollowed out and hallowed in fields, ditches, hardwoods and pines and worn stone. It is silent memory for the most part, speaking lower than a whisper. It is memory that shows itself in such slow movements. Places do accumulate presence and invested significance, but we’ve all seen the time-lapse movies in modern nature documentaries: reality sped-up to somehow keep pace with our racing attention span; it’s hard to move slowly enough to hear what this place’s memories have to say, and it is true, that something about the ground out here grounds me, locates me, gives me a place from which to understand myself that has been tended and growing long before I ever set foot here. 

Out here, in real creation, everything is growing, but nothing seems like it’s growing. Everything is changing so gently that the human heart, so often bruised by the fast thrashing of change, is eased into the passing. The paths that run through this place, like Macfarlane says, make their way through those who take time to walk them.   I think that when we love a place well, we practice and participate in God’s own act of creative hospitality; we make good places in and out of the place God has made. This whole world is built that way; it has been lovingly prepared for beloved children. The field I visited today was made especially for waiting and watching in stillness and quietness. We can craft those kinds of things, maybe we can be those kinds of things too?

Daffodils, wagon paths, and lastly, homeplace oaks. What is it about trees and people? There is a mysterious intertwining. Lately, I’ve enjoyed reading a book edited by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson and Micheal Partridge called “Informing the Inklings”.  It’s a collection of essays about author George MacDonald’s influence on Lewis, Tolkien, and their friends. Trevor Hart, in his essay, says, the world is “laden with a surplus or excess of symbolic significance.” And MacDonald says elsewhere that “the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence, an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought.” By sensuous he simply means that the world is available to five physical senses, taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight. 

The human soul is given, in the physical creation, corresponding material whereby it might glimpse it’s own meaning and potential. We look to God’s Creation for images with which to clothe our thoughts and feelings, don’t we? You can hear it in a phrases like, “I slept like a log,” or how we speak of our “family tree”. 

There is something about planting trees in front of your homeplace that externalizes some internal human reality, planting it firmly in the soil those old settlers must’ve hoped would nourish a good life in a new place. The trees, rooted as they were, outlasted the house. They stand there still, thickened and knobbed by time’s slow passage, hidden here in plain sight, daffodils huddled round. 

Scripture says that God himself will plant us. We’ll be called “Oaks of righteousness, trees planted by the Lord to reveal his splendor.” So maybe there really is something to the planting of homeplace oaks, like my Dad pointed out? Maybe the connection is not a coincidence. Perhaps there are many of these tell-tale connections, these points of contact with reality planted in plain site? Signals still sprouting up, blooming like daffodils where a long-lost garden was set once upon a time? Where are the wagon ways – the ancient paths worn into the earth by forgotten generations? What splendor glimmers out even from the grey of old gravestones long bewildered past the end of some dirt road in rural Mississippi? Those names on those stones are washed and worn by weather and time, the bodies that belonged to them returned the dust.  But each of those things is like a road, and every road ought to go someplace. 

If you wander out at the farm, you’ll see that time laps across the open field and foams against the burr oaks in sunset orange. It doesn’t seem like a homeplace, it certainly doesn’t appear to bear the markings of a Kingdom, though it does carry the memory of an old one and the makings of a new one. 

My Dad took some of those daffodils from the farm and transplanted them to the yard in the house where I grew up. I like to imagine that someday, long after my childhood home has gone, after my parents and I have died, after the resurrection trumpet has bloomed brightly like the petal-trumpets of those little flowers, we’ll return here together. We’ll know the place. We’ll look for the familiar trees, and know our old homeplace had all along been the Lord’s seedbed for us: most of our lives just the plowing and at the very last moment a sowing.  

We’ll say, “Yes, this is the place – look, there are the daffodils.”