French la Vie

I’m standing in the house where I first knew the world. The walls feel the same.
The ground holds me like it remembers my weight.

It hits me somewhere between the front steps and the kitchen light—this quiet feeling, soft as dust motes in morning sun.

The scent of chocolate chip cookies cooling on the counter. Homemade pie, the buttery kind. Laughter from playing cards, and riding bikes down the lane-

Out back, the pomegranate tree leans a little -older now, like everything. The rice fields shimmer over yonder beyond the fence, breathing under the sky.

I didn’t know, then, how safe I was.
How rare it is to grow up in a place where love didn’t ask to be seen—it was there in the daily give and take of a large family, with parents who stayed true to their commitments and faith.

These are memories, yes—
but also something deeper.

The Ground Beneath

Endless seeds dropped into fertile ground.
Some sprouted.
Some turned, twisted,
grew in ways I couldn’t see.

I was rooted before I ever knew I might need to be.
Because I never needed.

Need was quiet here.
Like the moon.
Like the way seasons come and go without asking.
A presence so constant, we don’t even name it.
It just is.

That’s what this house held.
A kind of love that didn’t announce itself—
it planted.

Planted things in me that would hold
when the world started to shake.
Planted trust,
planted calm,
planted a sense that I belonged to something solid.

Now, looking back, I see what was growing under me all along.
What still grows.
A steady root system, unseen but unshakable.
And I carry it with me.

Even far from here,
it holds.