Watching the World Go By

Watching the World Go By

“Hey, Honey,” the cashier said. “Got any plans for the weekend?”

I was so caught off-guard, I almost laughed. “This is my second weekend here.”

She smiled. “Oh, you like it?”

I explained that I was actually returning to Tennessee after living in Wisconsin.

“Did you like it there?” she asked.

How could I sum up the loneliness and the beauty, the months of gray on gray cracking open to the technicolor spring? I replied, “The winters are cold.”

She said, “I got family up in Buffalo, New York. It’s real cold up there.” She paused, absently tossing more produce into my cart. “When I first moved to Tennessee, I could go without a jacket all winter long, but not anymore, I can’t!”

Throughout this entire exchange, I couldn’t stop grinning. The woman was so exuberantly interested in my life and—stranger yet—was equally as generous while sharing about hers. I found, too, that I couldn’t exchange small talk as easily as before.

Maybe extroversion wasn’t related to personality as much as it was related to the South?

Stowing my groceries in the van, I hit the interstate that wound up the mountains before cutting a left and descending the switchbacks. I took a right back the road that once led to the home my husband had built five years ago. Sun poured down through the leafed trees that canopied over the road, which moved from asphalt to gravel halfway back.

My heart constricted with a sense of loss as I took a left in our former driveway. At the end, my parents’ darling little cottage stood. I caught glimpses of our old front porch as I pulled in. I swallowed hard and shut off the van. My daughters ran out to greet me. My mom wasn’t far behind.

I hugged them all. We sat on the back porch as the children splashed in the hummingbird fountain. My mom brought out a tin filled with jewelry that had belonged to my aunt, who passed away from breast cancer two years ago.

I picked out an abalone pendant, and my four-year-old picked out a rhinestone necklace she could use for dress-up. I walked back into the cottage, looked in the china cupboard, and saw the snow globe, cocoa set, tiny ornaments, and hand-painted pitchers that mean so much to my mother.

The whole time, my deceased aunt’s abalone pendant grew warm in my palm. Grief crowded my chest as I continued to stand there, my reflection–a mirroring of my mother’s, my aunt’s, my grandmother’s–visible in the cupboard’s glass door.

Whenever we would visit Tennessee for Christmas, or for a summer trip in July, I could never be around my parents, in-laws, siblings, or friends without an overriding sense of grief. The entire week, I would try to stuff it, but it would inevitably arise once we returned to Wisconsin, requiring me to find my emotional equilibrium by processing, through writing, what I felt.

Now, I was still feeling grief, but it was phantom emotion. Just as an amputee victim can feel the pain of a missing limb, I could feel the pain of that separation even though the reason for it was no longer there.

An immense weight lifted off me as I understood I could love this valley land for entirely different reasons. It would no longer just be the place where I’d brought my firstborn baby girl home, buried my miscarried child, and brought my second girl home before, eight weeks later, sobbing against my father’s chest and saying goodbye.

Instead, it would soon just become Oma’s and Opa’s home: the magical place where my children play dress-up and have a tea party in the darling cottage that has been patiently waiting for them this entire time.

It would be the place where I eat Easter dinner with my family and bake cookies with my mom at Christmas. And though, eventually, I will once again have to stand in front of that china cupboard–staring at those items while trying to sort through the ones to keep–Lord willing, I have years of memories left to make before that time.

After I said goodbye to my mom, I put the girls in their car seats and drove fifteen miles to our temporary home until we build again. Before I took a right on the road, which looped past a field of cows and then dipped past a small, country church, I looked at the square house beside the turn.

For years, whenever my husband and I would drive over to our in-laws’, I would see the old farmer sitting on the front porch in his bib overalls while watching the traffic go by.

A year and eight months had passed with the plodding fleetingness of a lifetime, and yet he was still there. Happiness bubbled up inside me as I saw him: a bucolic statue of permanence in such an impermanent world.

I waved and waved through the windshield, but he either did not see me, or he did not care to return the gesture.

Regardless, seeing him, I was overjoyed by this unpredictable life, and how it has allowed me to experience living in a slave quarters on a Christian camp in Tennessee; in a T1-11 sided rancher built by my dad; in a renovated mansion on a liberal arts campus in Kentucky; in an apartment in our grocery store on the Cumberland Plateau; in a solar-powered farm in Wisconsin, and now transitioning back to a new place, near the people I have loved for so long—all before my thirtieth birthday.

Who knows? Maybe, in sixty years, I will have lived so much life, I will also be content to sit on my front porch and watch the world go by.

Where has your journey of life taken you so far? Where do you want it to go?