Home Place

Home Place is a love story. It speaks of our relationships with place and each other, and the struggle for wholeness in uncertain times.

When a damaged and idealistic young woman retreats to a mountain valley with her proud-cut, green-broke gelding, the people she meets tell her how they came to and lost the place where she now lives.

They tell of the 16 year-old Welsh boy, John Davies, who in 1863 walks over the ridge looking for gold and finds and marries Mary Yatkin, the Maidu headman's daughter. They tell how from that union generations of family grew and grow, ranchers, basket-makers, loggers, millworkers, healers and teachers who plant orchards in the valley coves, raise animals, barns and children whom they teach to be careful and to care for the spirits who inhabit that world.



As the young woman grows old and comes, like they, to be long in that place, she strings their tales along her own of twenty-five years watching.

Home Place is that beaded strand of witnessing in place and time, an account of lost and longed for homes, that ephemeral place in ourselves we try to know or remember. It's the light left on in the kitchen to guide us when we, like old John Davies, need to be found or make our ways home through the dark.

Elisa Adler teaches in California and Nevada colleges, and farms with her family in the Northeastern Sierra.