In Migration

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist...but the ability to start over."

~F. Scott Fitzgerald~

I walk in through the still-strange front door and see my very familiar things scattered all over the floor in piles and boxes. I get into bed and when I wake, the slants of sunlight filter through the blinds over my skin. It takes me several minutes to remember where I am. Home now. This. Here.

I've been sleeping with a stack of my books, like the words themselves can hold me. I listen to music, since the television and Internet haven't been turned on yet...watching from my sunporch how the moon is framed elegantly through the windows. My writing desk erupted the day after I moved in with a swarm of miniature ants. I cried for a minute, then decided it was good to see my desk so teeming with life, as quiet as my words have been.

For years, the ritual was sitting at the kitchen table and (in recent months) watching for my crow (with the tuft of white feathers on his breast) to arrive while I tried to wring writing out of my fraught, uncertain moments. Now, I head for the desk and listen to the rattling ebb & flow of the cicadas thrumming nearby...the countless birds calling morning news back and forth to one another. My windows are level with the slender boughs of the trees and I feel perched in a nest of my own, left hand moving across the pages with black ink pen, in some sort of private call and response.

The children were with me there yesterday, running around the backyard and determining the exact spot to situate their new fort. They played hide and seek in the small space, slamming the screen door and clamoring for juice boxes with flushed, sweaty faces. Then, I felt it...for just a moment. Where they are is where home is for me. Then, they were gone and I was back to my solitude. I had a chance to go sit on a deck and drink cold beers with the girls who love me best...but I didn't want to leave my spot, other than to take a run around the new neighborhood, lungs aching, muscles burning, coveting the gardens in riotous bloom all over. One house in particular has captured my writerly attention and I've already started telling myself a story about an eccentric elderly woman living there who reads palms and tea leaves and has a peculiar brand of magic that makes her flowers so obscenely lush and saturated with color.

I am starting over.