Goodbyes and Hellos

We said goodbye to a friend a week ago. Morgan is moving to Scotland. We had a little party at the bookstore with Scotch and cider, and a bit to eat--cheddar biscuits, salmon and pancakes, cake. People streamed in with cards and chocolate and other little going away gifts.

Jay and I had been friends with Morgan since our move here four years ago. Then, two years ago, Morgan moved his espresso and pastry business into the bookstore and he and I worked side by side, listening to each other’s shop patter, learning the rhythms of each other’s days. He knew that Harper Collins ships their books in terrible boxes; he’d learned who placed special orders and didn’t pre-pay or pick up in a timely fashion. I knew who tried to sneak away without paying for their coffee. Whenever anyone came in and expressed frustration or despair, Morgan would say, Here’s the thing—and then he’d go on to provide some analysis. Sometimes the thing was capitalism or the fact that the person driving you nuts was a moon-howling narcissist. Whatever was going on, Morgan had an answer. In the quiet moments with no customers, we talked about our families, our town, books, our lives. We had in common our workaholism, low-grade grouchiness, love of reading, and deep desire for the world to be a better place.

To say good-bye right now has a particular valence. As the thirty or fifty or whatever of us stood around chatting and drinking Scotch, we talked about moving other places or spoke with gallows humor of staying in the US, of carrying passports, based on our perceived vulnerability to our government. I drank a glass of Scotch which reminds me of my mother and stepfather. It tastes like arguing and divorce, I told a friend. There was also the sweetness of small town life: Someone thought it was a potluck and brought soup. The chef who prepared the food sent over a homemade loaf of bread for me as a gift. I gossiped in the corner with a friend I’d just had coffee with hours before; already, there was new stuff to talk about! A guy I know from the gym seemed to be talking animatedly with a woman I’m acquainted with; later, I saw that they’d become a couple and they were both a bit glowy. Someone’s breath smelled slightly like pot. Some children were slamming the bathroom door.

One guy at the party recently loaned me a book, even though I’m the bookstore lady; there was someone at the party I’d loaned a book to, even though I’m the bookstore lady. Somehow, it makes sense that I sell books and I also borrow and loan them out. I had cake for dinner, and after three hours, I said to everyone that it was time to go home and I started cleaning up. I’m not convinced that people were meant to have the freedom we do to just up and go and change everything, even though I’ve done it all my life. I hugged Morgan and cried and gave him a picture I’d made in the art space in my barn, fifteen feet from the goats.

Now there will be no one to tell us what the thing is, I said.

The thing was always inside you, Morgan said, and I told him to fuck off. The picture I made was the scene from behind our shared counter, so he wouldn’t forget what it was like to stand there for those two years. Put it on your frig in Scotland, I said. And you can either gloat that you escaped or miss us. If it was me, I’d gloat.

Back at home, the moon was bright. While we slept, the dogs kept waking up and running outside through the dog door to bark at something. A deer died in our haystack a few weeks ago, and Jay had to drag her out--she was fairly young and not too big--and haul her body down the hillside. She’d just been there, dead, until finally some predator found her and began the work of taking her apart. I thought perhaps the dogs were hearing that, the feeding. I was cold all night and it turned out in the morning that I’d left the back door open and the temperature had dropped below 20. The house was sixty degrees.

There’s an odd feeling in the air, something beyond or perhaps precipitated by the nightmarish tenor of our times. I have been having dreams lately that I am me, now, but I am also still married to my first husband, my children’s father, from whom I have been divorced for more than twenty years. In the dreams, I know what I need and want and it’s not that marriage and I am surprised to find myself still married because I am me, now, knowing what I know, and yet I am trapped in the marriage and I cannot get out. Throughout my life, my dreams have always been about being trapped, but the narrative changes. Sometimes I’ve lost my airline ticket and I’m stuck someplace. Or, like a child, I cannot escape my mother’s house. My speed will always be Go! I’m trying to reconcile that with the feeling that this town, this landscape, are home.

This is the kind of town that’s like any town where some people come for a short while and others stay for a long while. For four years, Morgan worked incredibly hard, and in his off hours, got square dancing going, hosted Lord of the Rings at the local theater, cooked for friends, played games, and traveled around with his partner, looking for good restaurants. He read books and did a stint on town council. He says he’ll come back to visit, and we joked that he’d move back and buy the bookstore from me, but I bet he doesn’t come back. He is well and goodly done with our town.

I am still astonished that a person can be here and then across an ocean in no time at all. Ten days ago, one of my grown children traveled from the US to India for two days for work; today, another grown child flies to Japan. Someone leaving disrupts the physics of a place. Their house isn’t theirs anymore; you won’t run into them at the store. The particles shift. New people will occupy their house and stand in front of the cereal at the store and I’ll pass them by, the strangers. Or not.

In town, there are lots of feelings about Morgan leaving. Some people don’t really understand why a person leaves. Personally, I feel envy, a longing for adventure. I like novelty. For years, I’ve ordered my life through longing, through desire for the next thing. Once, this place was the thing I longed for and now I am part of it. I miss longing as an organizing principle for my life yet I am attached to this landscape, its desolation and distant mountains, its lichens, rocks, and grasses, its heavy soil, glommed onto my sneakers.

Now, the cold is gone and our winterless winter—with temperatures fifteen to twenty degrees above normal—is back. This week, I had the air-conditioning on in the car as I drove home from a city an hour from here where I’d gone for an appointment. A half mile from my house,a cow stood next to her slick newborn calf. She was eating the afterbirth hungrily. She was pleased with her accomplishment, triumphant even. She’d gestated for months and delivered her dazed calf onto the sunwarmed soil. Now we have a new being in the valley

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