I do not know why these bells are here. They look old. They feel significant. The cord that connects them is fraying, but seems to have been carefully braided at some point long ago. At some point less long ago, someone seems to have hung them on a modern wreath-hanger.

I have Googled. I am sure these bells have a meaning, but various combinations of “brass bells/three/attic/old house/why??” have proved fruitless.

People who see them seem a bit creeped out by them. Are they there to ward off ghosts? malevolent spirits? Maybe they’re there just to make a pretty sound in the winter drafts that surely gust through the unfinished attic of this nearly century-old home.

There is a history of bells in folklore to ward off evil spirits, to clear the air. There are the bell, book, and candle of Catholic exorcism. The number three is of course loaded with all kinds of symbolic significance. But I’m still not sure what these three particular bells are for. At first I needed to know, but I’m starting to learn to be grateful for the mystery.

About a month and a half ago, I drove a thousand miles north with my husband, Things 1 and 2, two puppies, and two vehicles crammed with all of our worldly goods that didn’t make it into the moving trailer. We were moving home, returning to the Shenandoah Valley after the fever-dream of nearly two years in southwest Florida. We needed to go there. There were things each of us needed to learn that could only be learned by leaving home. There was magic there. There were excellent opportunities, stellar human beings and dogs and wild things to meet and be changed by. There were epiphanies to examine minutely under the neverending sunlight of a subtropical sky. There were egrets, too, and otters, the wild lushness of the Everglades always pushing, pushing at the edge of the so-called civilized world.

Ultimately, for a thousand reasons, it was not a place where we could stay. We made home there for a little while, but the mountains, the seasons, our families were calling. We needed to be where we were for a couple of years. Then we needed to return.

There’s an old saying that “you can’t go home again,” and I’ve thought about this a great deal over the past two years, often longing fiercely at times to go back home. I often wondered if the saying was true. I’ve come to realize that, like most old wisdom, it holds truth. There are times, ways, situations in which one cannot go home again. But like most old wisdom, it’s distilled to the point of a catchphrase, and a catchphrase cannot capture the complexity, the richness, of life. Ultimately it’s what we take from them that signifies. In my own case, I couldn’t go home again unchanged, indifferent.

I needed to leave to appreciate home better. It’s not that I didn’t love it–but I appreciate it now in ways difficult to articulate beyond OH MY GOSH IT’S NOT FIVE THOUSAND DEGREES HERE. We are fortunate to have been welcomed home open-armed by family, friends, our old school community. And in coming home again, I am learning this familiar place in new ways.

For example–my husband and I learned on a recent walk downtown that there are tales of an emu that runs wild around the periphery of the city. The shopkeeper who told us about the emu assured us that there are not merely rumors, but sightings. There is an emu running around town. I had no idea.

One evening we walked across a train track and up a steep hill. For some reason, neither of us had taken this particular route before, despite decades of living in or near this place. Below us, the downtown spread out like a sparkling blanket in the twilight. Rock music pulsed from a concert outside an old brick building. On the slope of tangled undergrowth and old trees above us, two bucks stood silhouetted against the fading light, their antlers visible only from just the right angle. The wild butted up against the settled, and time swirled and slipped away. I had no idea.

And then there are the bells in the attic. What are they for? Are they for anything? I have no idea. Maybe I don’t need to. The bells, at first a riddle to be solved, are becoming a symbol of this place, and of homecoming. You can’t go home again without learning things about home that you didn’t know before. You can’t go home again without discovering that it’s not only the distant horizon that holds onto its mysteries. Not only in far-off lands, in strange climes, do we discover the unexpected, the inexplicable. It is here, with us, always.

My parents’ friend and neighbor is a true hobbit–not like us descendants of Tooks who get swept off on adventures to foreign lands. He is a sage, a philosopher, a mender of tractors and a keeper of the mystery of contentment. Why would I want to travel, he says. Everything I need is right here. Maybe some of us see the mystery clear-eyed from the beginning. Others of us need to uproot, to follow the wizard and the dwarves despite deep misgivings about missing tea time. And maybe this is exactly how it should be. Someone has to leave the Shire to understand why it is precious and fragile, where it is located on the map of the world, exactly how small it it. Someone has to stay there to do the day-to-day work of protecting it, learning every season of every year, mending the tractors. This is another mystery–why some of us need to stay and some of us need to go.

At twilight, bats congregate in the backyard, swooping and gyring, circling in the hunt. I have never seen so many bats in one place, aside from Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. The bats flit between the overhanging branches of the towering walnut tree, the oak, and the maple that mark and guard the boundaries of our back yard. They, too, are a mystery. Mystery is everywhere. There are mysteries that beg to be solved, but there are also mysteries that exist to remind us that we are simultaneously never and always at home, no matter where we sojourn.