I was a hobbit, and found myself a Shire.
It was not long after Owly started calling me Hobbit that the one bedroom apartment I called affectionately The Shire found me.
Located off of Central Avenue and Lowry in Northeast Minneapolis, it was a one-bedroom apartment with an unusually tall ceiling. Its plaster walls were thick and dampened the noises of the Outside World as though they were a force field.
The most remarkable feature of The Shire was its tiny hallway. This short hallway felt barely there—like the thin connective tissue separating the abdomen and the thorax of a thread-waisted wasp. It served as a portal between the south-facing room and the deeper cavernous burrow of the northern realm. When you were in the north, the insulation effect felt even more intense…as though the Outside World was physically removed by several degrees.
It was in the Shire that I started molting.
Yes, like as in shedding my skin from a former self. And also: as in detaching myself from the whirlpools of noise and clutter and chaos that staticked my previous life. There were many years that made up that life. When I entered The Shire, it was like beginning another life in another body on another planet.
Not surprisingly, the Shire was the place where I ramped up Mulberries on Mars, a dream project that had been barely if at all simmering for years on the very back burner of my list of wondrous and impracticable and highly soothing to the nervous system projects. Mulberry on Mars was equal parts self preservation, necessary distraction and present-day science fiction. I found myself living in a world within a world…molting layers of myself…all the while mass producing silkworms as a renewable protein-rich food source for another planet that you could find by walking through a door on the other end of a short hallway.
From Owly’s Pen
When Hobbit lived in The Shire, and my humble abode was the backyard faerie cottage tiny home, I traveled extensively for work. My shiba inu, Sukha, and I logged thousands of miles on our little Prius that I lovingly named Alice.
Melbourne FL, Carbondale CO, Gloucester MA, Sioux Falls SD, Door County WI.
The faerie cottage made me feel like I had my own set of faerie wings. Flitting from state to state, spreading my pixie dust with various yoga classes and coaching clients along the way.
What my Hobbit didn’t know at the time is that I needed to come back to The Shire and The Faerie Cottage to replenish my pixie dust supply. While the places and spaces we called home were truly magickal, the true source of my pixie dust was Hobbit himself.
My favorite way to return from a trip was to flit my little self between the shrubs outside his kitchen window. I’d often watch him tinkering about his kombucha brewing teas or trimming mulberry branches for his silkworms for a good couple minutes drinking in the elixir of his steady humblings before I’d tap ever so softly on the window.
Wait for it.
Hobbit is a slow processor.
(it’s part of his amazing charm)
He’d take a moment before he’d register the tap tap tap on the window.
When he did, he’d look me right in the eyes, separated no longer by state borders, rivers, and hundreds of miles of interstate.
With only the slightly distorted glass of the kitchen window between us, he would smile.
A bright, twinkling, happier-than-Golum-with-the-ring beaming huge smile.
We’d stand there, me in the shrubs outside and he in the mulberry branches of his kitchen, smiling at each other, unwilling to break the spell of the reunion for the half a moment it would take to walk to the front door and let me in.
This!!! Is soooo lovely!!
I huge-smiled my way through it, managing to read every bit even though tears threatened and welled…because every single image you two painted resonated as ….well….just TRUE and RIGHT and…magic!! ✨💜✨
You two have found your portals…and are inviting the rest of us through! 😻🧚😻🧙🏻♀️📚🥰