June was a month of oddness and simple wonderful ordinary: mulling over a big decision while counting down the last days of the school year, walks to the pool, firefly catching success and long conversations about the future. Heavy, light, heavy, light. Summer eased in while a deadline loomed. Knowing, not knowing, feeling sure, feeling no particular sense of direction.
This new place has been about growing up in some ways, which sounds funny when I’ve been an adult for some time. The thing about fundamentalism is this: it tries to keep you a child your whole life. Putting space between my physical body and all those memories turned out to be quite helpful. I did some growing up, out, in.
We decided to move back home. I hope it will be home.
I am glad to return to dear friends with whom I share deep roots, glad to have grandparents merely hours away than days away. I am glad to return to the big wide-open sky and spaces, to the feeling of getting into a sun-baked car, to the smell after a desert rain, to the mountains, to the contrast of it all. Blue and brown and subtle color everywhere.
I will miss this place with its walls of trees and abundance of water. I will miss the ease of growing things. The effortless flowers. The heavy, loud air in the summer, thick with cicada and bee and humidity. The smell of honeysuckle. Our little neighborhood with a circle that the kids ride around and the trails to the lake. Canada snow geese. A flash of cardinal against snow.
I’m achy inside about it. But I ache, in a different way, thinking about the possibilities that await us in the desert, with its wide open spaces and availability. Mountains that help a person know where she is, standing blue at twilight. Watercolor skies. I wish I could have both, but this is the way of adulthood, I suppose.
One thing we discuss, over and over, is the history of the place. For me, religion (I mean this broadly) was in the sky, the mountains, the rain-smell. It was in the East that I learned to whisper my thanks to the trees and the water and the very air that wrapped around me, as I used to whisper my thanks to God. Maybe I was talking to God in both cases, but I cannot seem to know this now. In the East, I found a way to live in the in-between space and honor it somehow. I rid my chest of the heaviness and searing pangs of religious angst, and was left with an ache for beauty. Beauty, I seek out. Beauty, I worship. Many of the writers I adore would say that this beauty is God, there is no difference. And I hear them, and consider their words, and simply go back to not knowing.
I may know someday, or I may never know.
a feast of crumbs 