Moving about

We have lived in this space for over a year now.  This space I didn't want to come back to and did. This space that I begrudgingly nurtured until I started to love it again on a long term basis. It seemed the dust had just (and finally) begun to settle, I was convinced I could tolerate South Carolina and had accepted it into my "5-10 year plan." Then Rob came home and said he suspected a position in the northeast may open soon, and also that he may be approached about it, and also that he wanted it if he was. I said ok. I don't know any other way to be. Somehow it will end up being a good thing. In the long run.

In the short run. We are moving to New York.

I'm thinking about it like a dream. I'm looking for houses and booking flights and mapping out travel plans and it's like a dream. And I think I have to keep it that way so it doesn't overwhelm me. I do things during the week that are organizational but in the back of my mind "it will make it easier when we're leaving" is the real reason. I think about how to re arrange the house so it will be ready for us when we return at Christmas. I talk in my head to the house and the trees about us leaving. Will you be okay? Have we loved you enough, in this short time, to weather our absence? And sometimes I cry.

Vapor -- and gifts from somewhere else

...a few minutes ago I heard my son faintly talking through the monitor in his room. I went upstairs and barged noisily into his room, ready to scoop him up and continue our day--but he was completely asleep, and didn't budge when I rested my hand on his little back (to make sure he was still breathing of course). He has been talking in his sleep more lately--either that or there is a child ghost chatting away in his room (also not unfathomable in this house). So I tiptoed out and back downstairs.

I walked through the kitchen and absent-mindedly picked up a peach from the fruit bowl on the table, washed it off in the sink, grabbed a paper towel and started walking toward the front door.

As I approached the door I mentioned to Emma (our niece, who is still sitting on the couch) that the thunderstorm was probably sadly going to float right past us without so much as a drop of rain, and without listening for a response (she's 11 and she's on her iPad, sooo....) I took a bite of the peach and pushed open the glass door to our front porch.

Maybe my eyes were closed for a split second. That's how it must have happened even though I sensed light as if they were open. The taste of the peach and the heat from outdoors and the familiar veil that is the smell of the woods surrounding our house -- it all happened at once.

In a split second I was 10 again. I was a long legged tom boy with white blonde hair halfway down my back. My dad and my grandparents were alive and vibrant. I had just gotten a horse that summer and my black cat, who I'd had since I was four, was stretched out on the hood of the dark blue jeep wagoneer my dad bought a few years before.  My little brother was my biggest annoyance and he and my two cousins were also my best friends. I was biting into a fat, pink, freestone peach that had been picked from a tree on my Papa's farm probably that morning and I had just walked outside to find a tree to climb so I could watch the storm roll by from its branches.

And I opened my eyes as if I was waking from a dream and had no control over it. I stood there for a moment, nearly reeling from the wave of memory and nostalgia. Then I walked to the side of the porch, leaned against the bricks and closed my eyes again in hopes of regaining any shard of that gasp of a moment

but it was gone, in a breath...