I was born and raised in Ely, and on my most recent visit back, I decided to visit the house where I grew up on Beacon Hill, across from the golf course, tucked among trees that have grown taller since I was a girl. Some of the woods I remember running through have been replaced by houses now. The neighborhood has grown. Time has moved in.
When I pulled up to the house, I looked up and saw something still sitting in the window: the old sticker from the Ely Fire Department. They gave them out when I was little so firefighters would know which bedroom window belonged to a child in case of a fire.
My mom had placed it in my bedroom window.
All these years later, there it was. I remember the number of chimney fires we had growing up in that house and how grateful my mom always was for that sticker in the window. It was such a small thing, but to her it meant reassurance — a little square promise that if the worst ever happened, firefighters would know where I was sleeping.
The owner of the house was kind enough to let me come inside and look around, and when I mentioned the sticker, he smiled and told me that if he ever replaces that old window during a remodel, he’ll save it for me.
Strangely enough, that nearly made me cry.
Before I left, he offered me grapes from the grapevines my dad had started when I was little. I stood there in the yard eating them, decades later, from vines my father once tended with his own hands.
They tasted like home. As I wandered around the property, I found myself thinking about another hidden place from childhood — an old basement foundation tucked back in the woods where we used to play. As kids, we were convinced it was ancient and mysterious. We spray-painted what we dramatically referred to as “hieroglyphics” onto the cement walls, certain we were creating something profound and important.
The markings are still there. I stood there laughing to myself, imagining some poor future explorer stumbling across our crooked spray-painted symbols and wondering what ancient civilization had once occupied the forests of Ely.
I even brought home a small piece of cement and wood from the frame of that old basement, a tiny fragment of a childhood that somehow still exists out there in the trees.
That house used to be home. But it isn’t anymore. After my divorce, I left the place that had been my home for 16 years. I eventually reestablished myself in Meadowlands, Minnesota, in a building that used to be an old feed mill and co-op. When I was first married, I bought groceries here.
Now, every day, I walk across the same hardwood floors where my little boys once ran while I shopped. I can still picture them weaving through aisles, their bare feet thumping against the old wood, laughter echoing behind me while I tried to focus on a grocery list.
Somehow, those memories sit beside another one entirely: me as a little girl walking through Zup’s or IGA in Ely with my own mom. Getting TV dinners with my dad when my mom was out of town.
And if I reach back even further in memory, I can still see the old meat market that used to sit across from where Mealey’s is now. Those memories have a smell attached to them, too. And if you frequented that little meat market in Ely back in the day, you probably know exactly the smell I mean.
Funny how memory works like that.
Sometimes we remember life through photographs.
Sometimes through sounds. And sometimes through smells that somehow stay tucked away for decades, only to come rushing back the moment we think of a certain place.
Different floors. Different town. Different generation. But the same feeling. The same small hands reaching for things on shelves.
The same mother trying to hurry children along.
The same ordinary moments that never feel important while they’re happening, but later become sacred in memory.
Back then, when my boys were running these floors, I never imagined I would one day live above them.
And when I was a child running through Zup’s with my mother, I never imagined how deeply I would one day miss those simple moments.
Technically, this is home now. But I think home is something deeper than an address.
We are living beings, creatures of the earth, no different in that way from the deer, the bear, the eagle, or the snake. We belong to the same world as the trees, the plants, the rivers, the rocks, and the water. Maybe home is not just the place we sleep at night. Maybe home is the place where our bodies remember they belong.
Growing up in Ely, nature was offered to us daily. The woods were not a destination. They were part of life. The lake, the trails, the smell of pine, the sound of birds in the morning — all of it was just there.
And maybe we took it for granted. But how often do we return to that kind of home now? How often do we step outside with intention, not just to get somewhere, but to remember where we come from? How often do we let ourselves be surrounded by our earth family — the trees, the plants, the water, the wind?
It makes a difference. Sometimes home is the house where your mother placed a sticker in the window to protect you.
Sometimes home is the memory of children’s feet running across old wooden floors.
And sometimes home is the woods themselves, waiting quietly for us to come back.
