I’ve been thinking a lot lately about writing.

I have always thought about writing.  Even when I’m writing I’m thinking about what I will be writing next.  I make notes on my phone, I record quick voice messages to myself, I write a quick paragraph aloud as I watch the light dance across the trees.

I’m unequivocally, and forever will be, a bit of a poet.

And a romantic.

I am sure for some it can be a bit much, but that’s okay.  Maybe their stuff might be a bit much or too little for me.

But lately, I was thinking about this:  I want to write and publish what I write almost everyday.  I used to write daily.  Now, it’s more hit and miss, and scheduled time in between the other work responsibilities.  This is fine.  It is practical.  But it appeals zero to the poet in me.

So I wrote this.  Recorded this moment for myself, and for those of you who read here.  These little moments of in-between…they make up a life, don’t they?

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October 30, 2020

I am standing in my house.  Not my new house just yet.  I am standing in my empty living room, in the home I raised my children in and in the home I built seventeen years ago.  The walls are empty, and even the whispers echo, now.

There is no life here, and yet, there was a whole life here.

Andrew asked me the other day if I was sad.  If I was getting close to breaking down, remembering all the Christmases and birthdays and the bringing home of babies.  I had just whispered to him after closing on our new house in Auburn, “This is the last time I will drive to this house and call it home.”

Listening to his question, I looked out the window.  I sighed.  I looked to the fields I had passed over and over again these last five years, commuting back home.  There is this one spot, a bend in the road, a certain field that has meaning to me.  Years ago, it represented getting closer to home, and sometimes, closer to pain.  It began to represent a longing.  For another life, another chance, another moment in time where things could be simpler.

A time where I could breathe fully.

And eventually, that bend in the road represented me and a healing that had begun to take place within me.  My home, although it was quiet and less filled that it used to be, became my place.  My calm.  My quiet spot.  My place of rest.

I looked out at my field, and I closed my eyes for just a second.  “I don’t think I will miss the house for the exact memories there.  I’ll remember the moments, yes, and I will remember them happily.  I think, though, I will miss the house because of what happened to me in it.  What happened within me.  What I felt there, sitting on my couch all those years,  I don’t ever want to forget it.  I don’t ever want to go back to going through the fast motions of living, and not connecting to exactly where I am and what I long to be.  I connected to that place because of that change.  I don’t want to be somewhere new, and forget.”

And in his way, he reached over, squeezed my hand, smiled easily at me, and said, “Well.  Don’t.”

our last night in the house, the kids under their blankets made by Nana, watching one of our favorite Harry Potter movies

I smile to myself as I stand in the empty living room.  I stand in the exact place where my couch spot would have been, and I looked to the right to the trees I watched in the midst of my healing, and the emotion takes over.  I am filled with hope.  I am filled with remembrance.  I am filled with the knowledge I will not forget what happened here.  I am filled with a touch of sadness.  I close my eyes, look up to the sky and imagine it…all that heavenly gold light I’ve mediated over all those times sitting right in this spot.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

It’s my fourteen year old son, Gray, who is now taller than me and boasts a pretty impressive beard when he wants.

“You taking a minute in here?”

“Yes, I am.  How are you?  You okay?  A lot of big things happened here.  I just want to be sure I took a minute to really be here, and to honor what this place was for us.”

He nods, understanding way too well for a fourteen year old boy.

A smile slowly spreading across his face, he looks at me, and says in his matter of fact way, “Yea.  It was a good house.  It’s a good place.  But I’m not sad.  I am happy.  I am happy with y’all, and the car is loaded.  We’re ready.”  He puts his arm around my shoulder, and almost whispers, “Come on, Mom.  Let’s go home.”