Bridge.

I'm sitting here on the couch. The window is open. The littles are quiet, in bed. There are september trees outside telling me change is on the horizon. It feels I’ve been waiting a while.

I've realized this weekend that even though Mr. Keller is gone a lot this time of year, my favorite is when he comes home. I miss him terribly and it’s so clear to me we’re not meant to be apart. But when we have been for a while, he always comes home so happy, with his wild beard and his heart a little clearer in my view.

He comes home and talks. (Talks!) He tells me he has so much quiet time in the mountains; he has so much time to think. He says he thinks of me and he almost always brings home dried wildflowers. My husband is rugged and sometimes romantic. (The two are a handsome pair.) 

We sat in our dining room tonight, eating dinner on a square card table we got for Christmas a few years ago. The room is empty, our dining table gone. I packed my first boxes. They are sitting in the corner of the room. It all feels strange.

While he was away, Mr. Keller told me he thought about Morgan, about our home and about moving, and about how quickly four years has come and gone and changed us. I realize that while I'm always thinking that to myself on a daily basis, he is not. And since he has been thinking about it, and we’ve been talking, we're both emotional. And in the very middle of talking, I realized something. Moving into this new house is so clearly carrying us into a new stage of life. Sometimes stages aren’t so marked. Yet here this is. And I suppose I’m blessed to be able to ponder it as it arrives.

A home is such a sacred place, and in a way, this one is the most special I’ve ever had. I became a mother here. I’ve brought two perfect bundles home from the hospital here. We’ve hurt and healed here, cried over joy, and I can’t sit in my chair and rock Danny in the nursery these days without wiping away tears. Our brand-new days have been here and I’m realizing now that they’ve somehow come and gone. I’m seasoned now. I’ve settled in. And I can’t believe how tender my thoughts are looking back over the years we’ve spent here. It is a beautiful life. I could say it a million times. The horizon is bright, and the past is so sweet. And here we are in the middle, a little. It feels that way to me.

 

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“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”  azar nafisi