This week’s Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 contributor has taken care of wild birds and raccoons in rehabilitation centers, traveled by white horse in West Africa and Mongolia, and lived with the Fulani and Bambara people of the Sahel: Erika Connor.
What is “home” for you? Is it a particular place or person or thing?
Home, for me, is always somewhere close to earth. I grew up beside a provincial nature reserve of boreal and mixed-hardwood forests where I played and found shelter. It was where I learned about myself, the deeper, stiller self under all the layers. On my travels I have felt at home in a tent, a Mongolian ger, a clay hut. I love these intimate spaces, round walls shaped by hands, made of earth or wool where all the families’ belongings are kept in baskets under the bed, or hung from the rafters. I remember sitting around the chief’s fire in the Manding Mountains in Mali, where the old women touched my face and fed me peanuts, I remember places in Mongolia or Senegal where the homes smelled of milk and the spice of a dung or wood fire, where often a tiny lamb slept in a corner or a chicken and her chicks.
I now live ‘off the grid’ in a little camper on the rolling hills of a farmer’s field in Quebec, surrounded by milkweed and clover and forests of cedar, pine and maple. From there I can’t see a house or a light. The coyotes sing every night, as do the loons. Read the rest of this entry »
