the most ordinary magic

by Sarah Twichell

I spent last week at my family’s cabin on the St. Lawrence Seaway. It has a tiny kitchen with an electric stove whose best quality is that it functions, and the running water isn’t potable, but it’s beautiful – for me, almost archetypically so. I woke up every morning to the boughs of a pine tree outside my bedroom windows, and they’re the same ones I’ve seen every morning up here since I was old enough to get a separate bedroom from my sister. When it is cloudy, as it is today, the water looks flat and grey in a particular way that is completely familiar to me. When it is sunny, I know exactly how it sparkles. Although I have no sense of direction normally, in this place, the knowledge of which way is north is as sure as a compass. In short, this place is one of my homes, a landscape so familiar that it feels burned into my heart.

From my office, I often take a walk at lunch, up behind an office building and past a river, then around to see a pond on the other side of the road. I count swans and kayaks. This, too, is familiar: the house with the gate like a tree branch, the spot where the men play chess on the hood of a car, the place where there’s a lilac whose blossoms hang over the road in May.

This is the most ordinary magic in the world: our feet cross a place over and over – whether it’s most days for a year or most years for decades – and slowly, we come to belong to that place. We don’t need any special techniques or well-honed skills, or any traditions other than those we make ourselves. In a world where things move quickly and it’s easy to feel adrift, this is how we make places where we feel rooted, connected, grounded. And as we return to these places, we return to our own inner quiet, to a measured motion as reliable as the turning of a clock or a monk praying liturgical hours. To ourselves.