Our first month home was quite an adjustment. For the first few days I was my nice and laid back New Zealand self. But eventually I felt the urgency of our Midwestern work ethic creep in and take over my body. I observed this in myself, as though I was on the outside. Suddenly the blueberry bushes and strawberry plants needed weeding, the lawn needed mowing, and everything needed ordered around the house–NOW. I became consumed with all that needed done, irritated by interruptions. But I was able to step back, appalled at myself. This is not who I am anymore. This is the culture I have grown up in.

I randomly decided to start reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to my boys about this same time. Reading this fictionalized autobiographical account of those who settled this land is uncovering a lot about how we got where we are, where this Midwestern work ethic that I long to shake off comes from. It was nonstop work to survive for anyone brave enough to settle this land. There was incredible urgency, largely due to the extreme seasons that come and go so quickly.

I was keenly aware of this difference when we were living in milder climates last year. What felt so odd to me was the constancy of the climate, when I am used to such drastic swings. I experienced the way climate really does affect people’s frame of mind, because I slowly grew into the relaxed attitude of those around me. What was missing was the urgency that things needed to be done NOW. There’s no need to “make hay while the sun shines” when every day is 70 degrees and sunny.

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first book, Little House in the Big Woods, also helps me understand the history of our gun culture. This is something I was self conscious about living overseas. The rest of the world can’t understand our obsession with guns, they are curious and baffled. Quite honestly I haven’t really understood it either. But Laura tells us there were large predators in these Wisconsin woods that settlers feared. They feared ever being caught without their gun. Our culture of fear is something I was also very self conscious of living overseas. But reading this simple children’s book helps me understand a little bit about where we come from as a nation. Even where a little bit of the fear that I despise, in myself and my nation, comes from.

Anyway, we were home for a couple weeks, just enough time to get the tractor working and the lawn mowed. Then Chris left for Northfield, Minnesota, where he was teaching the same three week summer camp he taught last summer. This time they didn’t have housing for all six of us, so the kids and I happily spent the weeks at my parent’s house in Iowa, visiting Chris on the weekends.

My parents are going through the ups and downs of trying to sell the house they’ve been building for 38 years. It’s incredibly hard to leave the cabin at the end of the lane where they lived out their dreams on the river. But the river has grown too unpredictable and flood prone.

I grew up out there on the river, a river rat of the purest kind. We didn’t have motor boats, but canoes and kayaks. I knew the river as a kid. I knew the dangers of snags, still I floated safely down it in nothing but a life jacket. We jumped off the drop offs on the sandbars, then floated down to where we could touch. We waded in shoes, because of all the broken glass. We caught frogs and baby turtles, crawdads and snakes, making our own little zoo in the backyard, for a day.

But my kids do not know the river I knew as a kid. I have taken them home to it, but I have not trusted it since the big flood that filled the house with 5 and a half feet of water. That was in 2008, the year our oldest son, Lewis, was born. They have enjoyed the sandbars, but they don’t know me as a river rat, only as a fearful, untrusting, protective mother.

When I floated the river with my kids a few weeks ago, I couldn’t get over how much the river has changed. The floods have cut away the banks so much that it almost felt like a different river. I don’t know it anymore. There are cutbanks where there used to be sandbars, right off our backyard, where we used to catch frogs. There are new drop offs on the new sandbars that I don’t feel comfortable letting my kids jump off. Life is always changing, just like the river, and I guess it makes it easier to move on sometimes.

But I felt completely different when I finally got out into the woods behind the house. There are miles and miles of riverbottom forests and bluffs that I grew up exploring as a kid. We didn’t own most of it, but were on friendly terms with the neighbors and so had access. We enjoyed the woods in every season, cross-country skiing in the winters, dressing for mosquitoes and poison ivy in the summers. My little brother and I had forts where we played house for hours. Our family named many places, like the old Granddaddy Tree, Owl’s Mountain, Linger Longer, the Valley of the Ferns, Corkscrew, for a start.

When I was a child I felt safer in the woods than in the house. I knew that if anyone ever came to our house at the end of the lane with ill intentions I could run into the woods. I felt I would be safer there, because I knew it so well.

As a teenager my love for the woods didn’t wane, but deepened. I began running the trails along the bluffs every morning before school. When the rising sun streamed through the trees at the end of the big pond I would take a picture in my mind, knowing that picture would carry me through whatever happened that day. Every day that I ran out there was a good day before I ever left home.

In high school my brother and I even undertook the challenge of making a platform in the Peek-a-boo Tree that was 16 feet off the ground. We used the old lumber from the swing set my parents had made for us as kids. We admittedly didn’t spend a lot of time up there, because we were sitting ducks for the mosquitoes. But we wanted to be out there. Even though we were busy with sports every season, we wanted to be out there still.

When I set out on my adventure in the woods a couple weeks ago things had changed there as well. The old trails I used to run were mostly unrecognizable because of all the downed trees. But I soon found the deer trails, and felt giddy with excitement as I followed them to see where they would take me. I still knew my woods.

One unforgettable day when I was in middle school I stayed home sick from school by myself. I was regaining strength from a pretty bad flu, if I remember correctly. It was spring and I went for a very long hike in the woods. The dutchman’s britches were blooming, but the bluebells weren’t out yet. I left our trails and followed the deer trails that day. As I was doing so, seeing signs of them everywhere, I heard a gunshot. My feet leapt with my heart and I took off running. I know it sounds strange, but I felt such a connection to the deer that I knew their fear. It was mine too, instinctively. I didn’t stop to think about the fact that no one was hunting me for quite a few yards.

I sensed the connection with the deer following their trails a couple weeks ago too. I trusted them to show me my woods again. I had questions, places I wanted to see. Were there still ferns in the Valley of the Ferns? No, the increased light from massive windstorms had turned it into a valley of berries instead. Were there turtles sunning themselves on the logs at end of the big pond? Not at this time of day, I should have known that. I felt honored when the trail lead me to a place where many of them clearly bedded down at night and sheltered their young.

Finally I found the place I was looking for, the little pond that had been my secret place, along my running trail. There was a tree that had fallen out into the little pond where I would play turtle as a teenager. I would just sit there, watching, until the frogs and the fish and the turtles that lived there were comfortable with me. I never wanted to leave that place.

When I found that little pond and sat by it again, I was flooded with love and joy. The pond was so glad to see me again. I felt its joy, and it was mine. The tree I used to sit on over 20 years ago was gone, but it didn’t matter, there was another one there for me to sit on. There was no guilt, only love and joy I can’t explain. I felt the truth of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I know those woods will always love me, no matter how far I roam, I will always be home there.

As I reluctantly pulled myself away and headed back to the house, to my children, I promised to come back. I said goodbye 20 years ago when I left home to go to college. But I have come back. Almost all my children have seen this place, the youngest was in the womb. But I will bring them back again. It is a huge part of who I am.

I was floundering when we first got back home, because the bugs were a shock after living in New Zealand where they aren’t a nuisance at all. They were bothering me more than they had before, and the fact that they were annoying me was upsetting me more than anything! On one of our weekends in Minnesota we got to hike at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve where my brother, Forest, works. Forest was excited to show us the bison he introduced there right before we left for Australia last year. I was thankful to get out there, but I was having a minor identity crisis, because I’d forgotten our hats and couldn’t get past the deer flies. I let them ruin my time out there, even though I’m Forest’s sister, and my name is Cedar. But visiting my pond, dressed to deal with the mosquitoes that whined in my ears, reminded me of what is true.

The truth is that I feel God’s love through nature in ways that words cannot explain. It is where I am most able to receive God’s love, to hear Him in the quiet of beating wings, even when they whine and buzz. I am the daughter of the King, but I am also a child of the wild. Yes, I still have an irrational fear of wasps. I don’t like mosquito bites any more than the next person. And it is disconcerting that so many of my friends’ children are coming down with Lyme’s disease.

But just as I learned a lot about receiving God’s Word on God’s terms this past year, I feel like I need to accept the fallen creation as it is too. I long for the day when it is restored, when Jesus will put an end to all this eating each other. An end to the fear that makes us turn to guns to protect us. In the meantime, I don’t want to miss all the love God has for me out there in the wild, because of fear, or annoyance.

This week I’ve gotten to enjoy our wild woods here in Wisconsin with my own kids. We were hiking the other day when Wesley said, “You know what’s sad, Mama?” When I asked him what he said, “That we own this place.” He was sad that other people who might want to enjoy our woods can’t because we own them. He wanted to make our land a park. This floored me, because I have been feeling the same way, but haven’t really verbalized it.

I am thankful that I’ve gotten to raise my boys out here in the wild, for sure, but for the past couple years I have not felt good about owning so much land. I really enjoy going to parks and seeing other people who are out enjoying nature too. I feel isolated out here, and miss being around people. I struggle with guilt that we don’t enjoy it enough to justify keeping it as just ours. So I agree with Wesley. I would be happy if our land became a park, as he dreams of, content to take up less space, like we did overseas, and share nature with others more.

Actually, that day sparked a new dream in me. My new dream job is to somehow take kids who haven’t had much contact with nature out into the wild. I’m so thankful for my roots that run deep in those riverbottom lands. I hope that the branches above ground will reflect their depth by the time I’m done growing.