arrival

It’s eerie and beautiful and sad. The wind lifts the grasses, the swallows dip low over the pond, over me. Everything is slightly overgrown, ebullient with spring. I approach, and a frog plops into the water. I walk through the puffball dandelions. Looking back you can’t see I’ve been there.

Everything is alive, growing, undaunted, but the place is haunted with a sadness. Oh, I guess that’s me. It’s like a ghost town now, the swallows are clearly annoyed to have their space intruded. The grapevine is mostly hidden in the encroaching grass.

I look towards the house, and for the first time ever give myself license to look at it as it might be, not as it is. If I could, what would I do? I walk through the now-hollow rooms and wonder the same thing.

The rooms are mostly empty except for boxes. I sit down and play the piano in that silent, silent space. No kids playing nearby. No cats or dogs wandering around. Absolute stillness interrupted by the sudden sounding of the keys.

It seems there is no happiness on either side of this equation. It seems.
 

unfinished pieces

Unfinished pieces. Packed up to be given away, or already bagged up and thrown out. Except that when I walked in today, I suddenly saw these boxes, and what they held, and it startled me.

I kept hoping, I kept hoping all along it would come back to me. And I kept all my fabrics, and my papers, and glue, and threads, and paints, and letters, and inks and little treasures that just delighted me. I kept hoping it would come back to me.

But throwing them out, giving them away, it’s such a giving up.

That’s the real thing, though. There, in that box. Unfinished pieces. Of me.