joy shall be yours in the morning
(or: domum, and those who love it)
Welcome to Chasing the Wind. This is an essay series engaging with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, chapter by chapter, from the viewpoint of an unabashed admirer (me). Here’s the preface explaining why I’m doing this. And here’s the playlist with five new homey songs added to it. Cheers, friends.
“... that small inquiring something which all animals carry inside them, saying unmistakably, ‘Yes, quite right; this leads home!’”
We rejoin our friends Rat and Mole on a short winter’s day, trudging back from visiting with Otter to Rat’s riverside home. Darkness is falling fast, and with many more miles to go before they sleep, they are hurrying toward a warm fire and warm beds. When the path they have chosen threatens to take them through a human village, Mole balks. Rat, however, doggedly set on the trail home, insists that all of the humans are “safe indoors” during this time of year, and warms them both with the prospect of peeking in the windows to catch a glimpse of domestic life along the way.
Kenneth has recently regaled his readers with perhaps one of the most exquisite domestic scenes in all of literature only one chapter ago. But this time, we experience it from a unique perspective — looking in from outside. Like his previous exaltation of summer through the lens of fireside reminiscence, this description of home life takes on new color through the eyes of two shivering creatures desperate to get home themselves.
We see the living fire inside each home spilling out of the small window squares “into the dark world without.” As each homely vignette opens to the creaturely observers on the outside — the warmth of domestic animals, the after-dinner conversation around the table, the bedtime preparations — the desire for home deepens within our stalwarts, and in ourselves.
Here, Kenneth highlights a certain “happy grace” of self-forgetfulness, the beauty of going about life as though unobserved (something our surveilled and exhibitionist modern selves could use more of). This kind of grace doesn’t require solitude, just an ease of living comfortably with one’s closest companions, without any requirement to impress them or prove to anyone that you belong. This, combined with the final dream-like portrait of a bird nestling into “perfect stillness” and a bitter reminder of the blizzard at their backs, propels Mole and Rat onward through the snow. They are in the home stretch, they can smell it. It’s only a matter of time.
But then something imperious and familiar takes hold of Mole, and everything shifts.
The summons, when it comes, is described as an “electric shock,” a “mysterious fairy call” that literally grabs Mole and will not let go. Mole’s old home — the one he hanged spring cleaning in and then abandoned to go gallivanting along the river with Rat — is close, and everything in Mole turns toward it with full and joyous yearning.
“Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so…”
Notice Mole’s impressions: he recognizes, humble animal, that there is not much to his old home. It is small and shabby and doesn’t rightly compare to the other homes he has experienced to this point. Toad’s home is palatial and grand, Rat’s home speaks of summer and adventures along the river, and Badger’s home is the epitome of simple hospitality. By comparison, Mole’s old digs are not known for extravagance, excitement, or coziness. The only thing we know of them is that last spring while cleaning, he couldn’t stand them anymore and wanted to get out.
But Kenneth isn’t going to do Mole’s home like that. The places of his little friends matter to him, so we are drawn back with Mole to the place where he (and we) started our entire adventure.
Unfortunately, Rat is single-mindedly deaf to Mole’s joyous elation. The specificity of Mole’s experience of home is what calls to him, something that Rat cannot capture, and whatever sympathy he would have had for his friend’s plight is muffled by the practicality of getting home before they are lost — once again! — in a blizzard. Of course, we know that Rat doesn’t mean anything by this, because we have been given evidence after evidence of his great care for his friends, which makes this rare moment of thoughtlessness that much more heartbreaking.
Thus Mole is torn between his loyalty to Ratty and one of the deepest longings known to creature-kind. He chooses Ratty, with “a wrench that tore his very heartstrings.” Only a ways down the trail and the sudden abreaction of Mole (a violent, sobbing, “paroxysm of grief”) brings Rat to a realization of what’s going on.
It struck me on this reading how inextricable joy and pain are in Mole’s reaction, even before he leaves the summons behind to pursue his friend. This is how desire functions. The experience we wish to have again, or the person we wish to be with, or the place we wish to go shines so brightly to us that distance from the object of our affection physically pains us.
Kenneth’s description fits the mood of Psalm 42:
As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival. (Psalm 42:1-4)
In this context, the home for the soul is for both a specific person (God Himself) and a specific place (the house of God). In exile, we experience shades of total rest, while we long for the place of rest where the One we love resides — the One who is love Himself. So even as we celebrate all that He is as our eternal Home, we ache for the full realization of that fellowship.
I was reminded of this on Easter Sunday this year, as our celebrations of resurrection now mingled with the not-yet of our daily lives. Along with our singing of “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” came the prayer requests for the family who had lost their home to a storm, the cousin on the battlefields of Ukraine, the chronic pain of a saint two rows back. We die and we live. We hope and we grieve. And sometimes, often, maybe all of the time, we are doing them in the same breath.
In the course of seeking to explain the unexplainable to Rat, Mole reveals that he is prone to a particular weakness: that of denigrating himself and the things he values in favor of a stronger personality near him — even such a good friend as Rat, who to his credit, has never asked Mole to do so. He describes his home once more as a “shabby, dingy little place,” not at all comparable to the other beautiful homes of his friends. Later, as they are looking for his home, he is “pleading and reluctant,” not wanting to be a bother or a burden to Rat by going out of their way.
Rat, of course, will have none of this. Instead, the wonderful animal says nothing for a long moment, and when he does it is to berate himself for his thoughtlessness. Plain pigginess aside, he waits patiently for Mole to recover sufficiently, then sets off briskly back the way they’ve come, determined to find Mole’s home.
Delightfully, while Mole hangs spring cleaning to hang out with Rat, Rat hangs the entire River bank, “and supper, too!” to help Mole. And now it is not the imperious yearning for home that brings Mole back to it, but rather “his imperious companion, who by a flow of cheerful talk and anecdote endeavoured to beguile his spirits back and make the weary way seem shorter.”
Certainly, in pilgrimage:
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)
Rat lifts Mole up long enough for Mole to take hold once more of the longing within him and pursue it to Mole End.
In reading this chapter for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the quirkiness of Mole’s place in comparison to the other homes we’ve seen. It has a style all its own.
The garden is full of cheap (but in vogue at the turn of the century) plaster statues of Italian heroes, whimsical cockleshell-laden landscaping, and goldfish. The vibe it gives off is one of cobbling together estate sale purchases into a pleasing mishmash, and as it is clear that Mole is not as well-off as the other animals, this might not be too far from what Kenneth had in mind. Perhaps Mole is an upcycler?
But also, while Mole overemphasizes the sorry state of his home, he’s not actually wrong in describing it as small and shabby. And of course, because he dashed out in the midst of dusting it, it is also covered in dust and carries a real air of neglect, and very few actual vittles. This fact strikes Mole almost immediately after he beams at his skittle-alley benches, realizing what his friend is giving up to come with him, and just how little resources for hospitality he has at hand.
And what does the Rat do? He offers, once again, an imaginative and expansive grace to his dismayed friend.
Instead of “shabby,” Rat describes the house as “capital!” It’s also not “narrow” or “small,” but “So compact! So well planned! Everything here and everything in its place!” And then, irrepressibly, he goes about making it so, and chivvying Mole along to help him.
Polishing, dusting, and setting a fire in place, our stalwarts manage to rustle up a feast fit for kings in the form of a tin of sardines, captain’s biscuits, and sausage — oh, and of course, a bottle of Old Burton’s. And slowly, carefully, Rat reminds Mole of why they are there: because of his profound love for the place, and also, perhaps, because of Rat’s profound love for his companion. Mole, emboldened by Rat’s gracious perspective (“This is really the jolliest little place…”) begins to remember this love and rest in it.
Just as they are about to set about devouring their “banquet,” Kenneth again adds grace to grace by sending a bevy of caroling field mice to their door. For not only has Mole End wanted Mole to return to it, not only did his things desire his presence once again, but his neighborhood hasn’t forgotten him either, and they’ve come round to ring in the Yule-tide with him, fulfilling long tradition in coming to his place last of all for hot drinks and supper.
I am reminded of that magnificent mystery, that barn animals were some of the first to see the Incarnation of Almighty God, born in the stable, in lowly estate — and not only by the original carol Kenneth pens, proclaiming “Joy shall be yours in the morning!” directly from the mouths of babes, or by the distant bells that follow their song. The mystery rings throughout this chapter, as it does throughout the book itself: that of unwarranted, unmerited, unforeseen grace upon little creatures with little to show for themselves.
Delightful as this unexpected choral concert is, Mole is immediately reminded of his lack of resources, and Rat is immediately on the move to set things right, sending an elder field mouse off with an “ample basket” to make some purchases for everyone. And Rat, as we know, is well aware of how to provision a basket.
What follows is a characteristically jolly description of their celebration, complete with the hilarity of young field-mice spluttering their way through a bit of mulled ale and being rendered tongue-tied by stage fright. And then, supper arrives!
“... and Mole, as he took the head of the table in a sort of dream, saw a lately barren board set thick with savoury comforts; saw his little friends’ faces brighten and beam as they fell to without delay; and then let himself loose—for he was famished indeed—on the provender so magically provided, thinking what a happy homecoming this had turned out, after all.”
After the reminiscence and feasting and a last nightcap, they take to their beds in utter contentment. And Kenneth leaves us with a note on “the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in [Mole].”
“He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there… and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
Rat has done his work well, choosing out of love for his friend to see Mole End as intentionally better than it is. The grace he offers to Mole in relation to his home is full of imagination. Rat tells Mole (and all of us) that the primary matter before us is not the shabbiness or smallness of our spaces, but what we will do with them now. And what we will do with them depends on what we imagine them to be, what we envision them to be capable of.
Our spaces need us to do this, otherwise they have no future. Despite the longings they produce and our penchant for anthropomorphizing them, our homes are indeed inanimate, incapable of changing themselves into something better, tethered to the entropy they experience. And without care and imagination, our internal landscapes are not much better off.
Thus we must view them with the grace and hope of Rat, not with the disdain or shame of Mole. And out of hope is born possibility. What if we were to closet the television and make the piano the focal point of the room? What if we filled that blank space of wall with this painting? What if we planted a tree that will take years to bear fruit, or berry bushes, or flowers? What if we formed a new habit? What if we lived with a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity? What if we viewed this challenge as an opportunity?
This is how Rat sees Mole End, and in some sense, how God sees us — now, as who we will be in perfection someday. Not only as we are now, but also as we will be. May we be those with eyes to see and ears to hear what He has in store for those He loves.
And in this we see also that what a home really needs is not all that complicated: just a little hopeful love. Love breeds familiarity, and familiarity in turn nurtures love, and altogether we are given hope in the face of the Wild Wood and Wide World outside — that we might find safe anchorage in a place fitted to us, to which we are fitted. Mole’s home, so neglected, is not without value. It’s just without residents.
No AI was used in the making of this essay. Cover art by Ernest Shepard, as captured by Bibliodyssey. I offer all current essays here for free, but you can always go paid to dig into the archives and support my writing habit.
Thank you for this, Chris. Once again I am endeared to Ratty and Mole by your thoughtful summary. As we pray about our own next home and live in the uncertainty of exactly where we are going, this line will make its way into my prayers: "that we might find safe anchorage in a place fitted to us, to which we are fitted".