I am a daughter of the small, born from a lineage of people who move through the world without bruising it. My blood is a slow river of simplicity and grace. I have lived, truly lived, not in the screaming heights of grandeur, but in the soft, subterranean joy of the ordinary.

I do not hunger for a “fancy” house; that is a mask made of cold stone. I hunger for a happy home. To me, happiness is a living thing, a pulse within the walls.

I find myself falling into the textures of the past. I touch an antique and feel the heartbeat of the craftsman; I look at old architecture and hear the stone whispering secrets of time. When I take up my graphite and charcoal, I am not just drawing; I am unearthing. I am weaving. My words, my lines, they are all ways of reaching back to the old books and the old songs that carry the beautiful, heavy weight of nostalgia. It is a sweet ache, like the smell of rain on dry earth.

The Future: A Whimsy of Wood and Wing

I see her already, the woman I am becoming. She is eccentric, perhaps, but only because she has finally aligned her soul with her surroundings.

I see the house. It is small, a cabin of breathing wood tucked between the dark patience of the forest and the mirrors of the water. There is a garden there, an English garden, wild and intentional all at once, and a wood-burning stove that eats the cold and exhales a golden warmth.

And the life within? It is a glorious, holy absurdity.

©️ Beatriz Esmer