Passages

A year ago this week, I put my beloved little house on the market, subjecting it and myself to the Change that comes with Venture. I miss my house with its cozy bedroom under the eaves. I miss my global purple, eccentric lime, and bittersweet orange doors. I miss 

the garden that I created out of my own sweat and strength and creativity. I miss the purple door-gate into the back yard and watching for the familiar sedums and hostas to emerge from the dead winter. I miss turning the soil and adding the compost that came from my own kitchen waste and the Black Kow that came from Lowes. I miss planting the summer annuals and the vegetables after what I hoped was the last frost and sometimes was not. I miss the cardinals and the titmice at the blue stained glass feeder on the deck outside my back door. I miss that it was all mine.

The dirt I have been dropping my coffee grounds onto all winter needs to be turned. The  mama and baby deer have walked through it, eating the bird food; I'm sure they would like me to plant something that would be more pleasing to their palette. And the moles and the slugs are waiting for their favorite tender plant parts, too. But it’s not my garden, and I still don’t have any interest. To paraphrase Ann Linnea in her book, Deep Water Passage, that I just read with amazement at her courage, both physical and emotional: Over here on this side of the country, on this side of my new life, I am trying to learn in a new way. Wait. Rest. Listen. Move forward out of the confidence of my own well. I have made several life-altering movements in the past, and I have found my way through the passages. I will again. In the last change, it was the garden that showed me a new way. This time it will be something else.

Over the past eight years, I often had the urge to take off on a weekend morning and just go someplace. But I could never find any territory I wanted to explore. I don’t love the southern Atlantic beaches and it was too far to the mountains and there was nothing in the North Carolina Piedmont that beckoned. In my new home there is no end of day trips I want to take. I am marking the roads I have traveled on my map, and it is turning orange. I think I could explore some county road through the hills and valleys every week and not weary of it.
 
This weekend I headed north. Way north. As far north as America goes. As I drove up highway number 9, paralleling Interstate 5, I bemoaned missing the photographs I wanted to stop and take to preserve the memory forever. But the route was a little too well traveled to pull over, and besides I was running late to meet friends for lunch in Bellingham, friends I met because I am a writer and so are they. So I had to satisfy myself with just enjoying in the moment the snow-patched hills that rose behind one of the many small lakes that dot the landscape here, their tops disappearing into the clouds. My eye observed the perfect vertical shot of water, hill, and sky as it flashed by. I smiled in the knowing that they would have been called mountains where I came here from; here they are just hills. And there would have been no way to capture for posterity the bald eagle that flapped out of the trees and made its ponderous way across the road right in front of me at windshield height, its snow white head, piercing eyes, and hooked beak leaving no doubt of its identity. WOW! Thanks!

Last night as I wrote this, I was in a lovely bed and breakfast in the tiny town of Everson, about an hour from the Canadian border. A mother and daughter, living together, own Kale House, where they make art and provide a warm welcome to travelers who find their way here. I sat in front of a gas fire with a glass of wine, wrapped in an afghan after soaking in a claw foot tub. The walls were painted nearly the same two-tone color I painted those in the house I miss, and the love seat that just fits me made me long for the one I have in storage. Perhaps I will get it out.

There was WiFi, but I didn’t think to ask for the password. I had a moment of disconnection panic, but instead I wrote and read and enjoyed the solitude as rain and then hail splat and pinged noisily against the west windows. Later I went to sleep to the music of the spring peepers through the open window. It would take more than a single evening to learn to relax into the certain kind of rest that comes of disruption of all routine, even that which I enjoy. But this is what I had, and I leaned in.

Next destination: Canada. (To be continued...)