Back and Forth

In the past few weeks, my husband John and I sold our home, packed our things and moved ourselves across three states, back to the home we had built together when we were first married.  When we began to talk about moving back, I swore that I would not become keeper of the Heeg-family-museum.  I told myself a number of times that 'you can't go back,' that 'we are entering a place that's changed significantly over the past 15 years and that's a good thing.' Consequently, we're not only unpacking, we're also renovating -- ripping up carpet, painting walls, updating furnishings.  It's all new.  So, tonight, I surprised myself when I walked into the smallest bedroom...

Before there was a window here, I stood in this spot and looked out, looked through the space where a window would soon be installed, looked clear through to the young oak with its gangly, untamed branches and decided to have it trimmed back to something like normal.  I added that to one of several mental lists.  The other lists were longer and had titles like 'what to buy for this room before the baby comes' or 'who to call to help us move' or 'names for boys' and 'names for girls.'  No doubt, I screened the entries on those lists dutifully then, and yet I had other things on my mind too. 

It was late afternoon.  The builders were gone.  The quiet could come out of hiding again, and I could let myself daydream, often a more enticing pastime.  How many late nights would I enter through that doorway, I wondered, and lift a little body out of the crib, a baby who would rest on my chest, our child -- warm and sighing at the end of a good cry, confidently depending on me?  How many times would I rock him or her to sleep in this little nursery-room-to-be?

A shushing breeze blew through the empty space where there should be a window that evening, where there would be a window soon, where there has been a window for thirty-seven years since -- a window I have washed inside and out many times, trimmed around when painting the walls soft shades of color over and over and over again, variously dressed up with ruffles and dressed out in bandana handkerchiefs depending on the outcome of four pregnancies.  Girl, girl, boy, girl.  Joy, joy, joy, joy.  And swaying from side to side in a very small space, I invented my momma dance in this room, dimly lit by moonlight filtered through that gradually aging, sheltering oak. 

          I’m much older now, back again after a good, long run elsewhere.  Here I stand, looking through this same air to the same branches that never did quite manage to look presentable, and I casually note how, over the years, things like that have come to matter less and less and, eventually, not much at all.

          Tonight I suppose I should be thinking about what I will do tomorrow, but I’m not.  Instead I'm meeting myself for a few moments, and I'm glad for the opportunity because I've had some questions.  As a young woman, could I begin to recognize what was sacrosanct and what wasn't? Could I sense what would come to mean more in time and what would mean less?  Tonight as the oak leaves rustle and settle down once again, I think, yes, maybe a little, maybe often enough.