Putting down roots

When my mind forgets things, my body remembers, and the April night air was just right for remembering. Four years ago, on April 8, 2021 we moved away from our home on the central California coast where I’d lived half my life and raised my son and daughter for the whole of theirs. We’d sold our house and had made a deliberate decision to move while we were still madly in love with our community. We had discussed the possibility of moving for years. After four decades of living a good life in a city we loved, then came the day when we just knew. We were one hundred percent sure we wanted to gain new and different experiences. We were nearing seventy, and for us, it felt like if we wanted to move, it was now or never. 

Away we went, feeling giddy and a tiny bit tragic. For better, or worse, we were leaving, and we didn’t have a new house to move into, not yet. Our temporary home while we searched for a new place to live would be a 27 foot travel trailer, on loan to us in the redwoods in Northern California. I am fascinated with tiny houses, and the concept of living with less, and this was the driver that convinced me to agree to live temporarily in the travel trailer while we searched for a new home. It was a spacious small trailer with a separate bedroom, an open kitchen-living-dining space, and a small bathroom. It would be my experiment in living tiny. I could try it out without making a commitment, knowing that after we found a house to buy, I would be able to spread out again. Which we have done, and I have written a few posts here about moving into our new place based between the ocean and redwoods.
 
Last week on April 8th we were house sitting for our family members who own the travel trailer we stayed in while we were searching for a new home to buy. It is parked in a meadow in their two-acre backyard, surrounded by redwood trees. 

When I took my dog out for a short walk before we went to bed the moonlight was bright, and I followed the tiny white and purple flowers that dotted the rain-soaked earth leading to the trailer. 

Although we had volunteered to house sit weeks ago, it did not occur to me that the time frame was exactly to the day when we moved from Santa Barbara and came to stay in the trailer. Then it all came rolling back to me. A soft mist was falling, the sky was silver-blue and I could feel myself pulled back in time. The chill air embraced me and I felt the familiar way the wind started up and then cleared. The redwood trees were still, and nothing was moving across the mountain. With the moonlight peeking out between pine trees and redwoods, I was stirred by some of the deepest waters in my soul, and this is when I understood that I had been returned to these mountains, walking this path to the trailer on the anniversary night of when we first arrived four years ago.
Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard


We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. 

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something. 

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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence

 "Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education