The Things We Leave Behind

Everything that is not love

When in January we first said the words, “Should we move?” to one another, I felt somewhere in my heart that if we did, it wouldn’t be until the summer was through. I saw in my mind’s eye the red blush making its way across the river’s trees, the ones who turn first, early signs of the autumn to come. But how could we know the timing? We were in the purgatory of unemployment when all the big decisions being made were not being made by us.

Now here we are, the tail end of a summer, the red blush beginning. And we’re seven days from packing a truck and leaving this space.

Last night our neighbors fired up the brick oven and muddled some berries in apple cider vinegar and we had pizza and plum cake and beer in their backyard. I felt myself tear up more than once. All these neighbors, all twenty and thirty years older than us, surrogate parents of sorts, the ones who bring us garden produce and lend us deskunking shampoo and cheer with us when we solve a storm drain situ that overflowed for more than a decade until we wouldn’t stop calling the town about it. None of it glamorous. All of it good.

I came home to a voicemail from someone I hadn’t seen or heard from in a decade. She had echos of our own sorrows and sadness from the past few years and was reading The Understory and when I called her back she said, more than once, the words I didn’t know I needed to hear and wanted to hear from the ones who should have said them, the ones I hope still will say them. The tears caught in my throat again. They’re welling over right now as I write.