On a Mission - Week 54

On a Mission - Week 54 - rootless

The Oregon autumn breakfast par excellence (Saturday morning version):

While walking, glean a fallen golden pear - sweet, juicy, perfectly ripe. Then pick out the prettiest blushing Snow White apple - spicy-sweet and crunchy - from beneath the roadside tree. A handful of gleaming blackberries for the hill back home. At the very top: golden grapes my neighbor has said are free game - almost floral in their sweetness. Followed up with a glass or two of cold mineral-rich McNulty water from the tap.

A friend last week scolded me lovingly, "You just need to move and get it over with. You're making this harder than it needs to be. You'll be fine on the other side of this."

Or more accurately, she laughed and said she was tempted to scold but she knows I know. And she is right.

This is Eden.

From which we must fall.

It's just that I've loved this place and living here and the people and stories it has brought into my life. It's not that I'm sad. Just rootless.

We have no home waiting for us there.

though there is a valley where I can hear my totem bird -
sandhill cranes --
no house though will have us yet
as far as we can tell

It's just that we feel like mere renters here.

Our old house (we say that now, our old house) emptying around us.
Bare floors revealing themselves like the unavoidable realities they are.
And pools of time wasted looking out the windows, asking,
Did I look out at this sky often enough?
Did I choose the right things to leave undone?
And how can this be ending right now in what feels like the middle of the story?

These rolling hills, golden at the end of summer, with their ribbons of green trees.

Of course we'll be fine.

I am so of the moment that wherever I am I know I can find reason to fall in love with it. But right now I am here in the place I have lived the longest among people I have loved with some of the best that's in me and for now this present moment seems infinite and impossible to go beyond.