This will be my last entry. I am going to, like Stephen King said, shut the door for a while. A trip to a New Hampshire bookshop, one of those independently owned ones, that you would picture New Englanders supporting, led me to On Writing, an instructional manual by Stephen King.
“What are you getting?”
“I’m buying it.” I responded as if knowing a laugh would soon ensue.
“Really! Have you ever even read Stephen King?”
“NEVER. But it says here that this is ‘The best book on writing. Ever’.” I said pointing to each word as I said them. She nodded after reading the review was written by “–the Plain Dealer (Cleveland).”
“And this?” looking at the book below. I handed her Kristin Lavransdatter, an 1,000 page mammoth of a book and continued to look at the poetry section in which we were standing.
“Of course you are!” She said and smiled as she heaved it back to me.
Ames left on Friday. Her new home is in Budapest and I am here in Smithville Flats, New York trying to write this last entry. Trying to be okay with my friends heading back across the ocean to a continent I feel more at home on than this one. Realizing we all have things to do and me letting her go to do it, and me doing my own work, is a necessary step.
“People move on…”chanting my mantra to myself, “and that is beautiful.” Thinking of Heather’s tearful goodbye three years ago, “I know you have to leave, I just don’t want you to forget about me.”
I feel the same way, yet knowing change is good.
I walked to the swamp today feeling very shaky in my new life, hoping a walk would do me good. I didn’t turn to my place on the guardrail, it wasn’t dawn nor winter and I didn’t want to stop moving.
“Keep moving until you feel better.” The voice in my head said, coming from the knowledge that a long walk usually helps put things in perspective. I have learned that seeing two herons take flight five feet from me does amazing things for my soul. I kept walking straight, past the swamp to the patch of evergreens that smelled of crisp broken needles.
I breathed in and turned back. I saw the large hill in front of me, the one I used to chant was a metaphor for my life. ‘Now’, I thought as I always do, in clichés, “piece of cake” actually looking forward to my lungs burning.
In the middle of the hill is the road that leads to the guardrail, which is the place I sit when I believe the swamp can give answers. It is the one place in the world that inspires both fear and reverence. I have seen the depths of my own heart there and it hasn’t always been pretty. There is a house that sits on the corner with a large porch, and in the front yard a camouflaged painted truck with wooden sides is decomposing, and now, a broken down Honda from 1980 is in the driveway. The exact kind of car I want to drive.
Aged semi-white Tyvek wrap covers the house, and has for years, giving the impression that the home improvement project has been finished. Today, there was a man in the yard, looking far older than he is, breathing hard and missing teeth, his kind eyes lighting when I said, “Good morning.”
Aged semi-white Tyvek wrap covers the house, and has for years, giving the impression that the home improvement project has been finished. Today, there was a man in the yard, looking far older than he is, breathing hard and missing teeth, his kind eyes lighting when I said, “Good morning.”
He stopped looking at the old Honda with bald tires, suspended on the metal ramps and said, “I haven’t seen you in awhile.”
This walk is a routine, but I have never seen him before.
I shook my head in agreement, thinking to myself, ‘I have been away for awhile’.
“Do you live around here?” He asked and when I said yes, he asked where?
“Ah the farm,” he said, “Nice place. That is a long walk.”
“I love it here.” I said more for me than for him.
“It is beautiful,” he added both of us overlooking our swamp. “Mrs. Troughton, lives two miles up the road, she’s 81, walks this everyday. Makes me tired just watching her.” He said with the lisp of someone not wearing his dentures, then looking behind us, “This is one big hill.”
“Yes, it is!” I said, now feeling my smile head to my heart, “So I guess I should thank you for the break half way. It was very nice to meet you.”
He knew me. I could see it in his eyes, he was wishing me well today, but what I realized was this wasn’t the first time. I saw he had wished me well before and probably not once, but many times. Perhaps when he saw me daily on those freezing winter days as I sat in the snow on the guardrail next to his house talking to myself, begging for answers that still haven’t come.
I sit here, at my writing desk and smile; thankful for those real or imagined well wishes.
So, I am going to shut the door for a while. I am going to write and read and cry and laugh. I am going to be the best aunt, sister, daughter, niece, friend I can, willing to shut my computer off to play a game of kickball or strip paint off 100 year old wainscoting when asked, chuckling at the fact that I am very happy I will never be a mom or matriarch of a family myself, yet very willing to be there for some of the work and much of the fun. I am going to say goodbye to the hurt of questions that have no answers.
Mostly I am going to love wherever I can. Even the ones with light eyes, camouflage trucks and missing teeth. I may walk the same road, the same hill, sit on the same guardrail, and ask the same questions, even miss the same people, but I am not the same.
I changed. I changed, but I didn’t forget Heather and she didn’t forget me and my guess is, Amy won’t either. I guess it is just time to take the next left.
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