the essentials

this is one of those months in which you cannot see the land you are swimming to. you just have to swim and swim and stop and tread water every once in a while and tip back and look at the clouds and the wheeling birds overhead and ask yourself if you can go on. And go on you do. A month of increasing golden light, increasing warmth, a month so rainy that you feel but yet cannot quite feel the warmth trying to break through. A month of held breath. A month of pacing the floors. A month of doing the things the realtor tells you to do, writing the checks to the contractors and packing boxes and moving boxes and taking things to the dump. A month of praying. A month of not knowing the outcome.

this is one of those months in which the things that matter, really matter. All but a half dozen of my books are packed away in boxes, and I didn’t really curate those with care or deliberation. They’re just what I happened to be reading, or re-reading. i am working to keep the kids happy and healthy, ensuring they have rides to and from school, celebrating their small victories, preparing for birthdays and buying them meals and little things as I am able. My youngest has begun quietly bringing a guitar into his bedroom, noodling and experimenting on it as if it was a second body. We speak tenderly to one another now, myself and the children. We try to consider one another’s feelings as we express our own.

this is one of the months in which interaction with children, and other things you see around you feel both hard-earned and transitory, like eggs, or acorns, or the perfect web of a spider.

It is another month in which you don’t get any more work done on the book project, because you are taking on additional consulting work outside your job to pay for the contractors, the filing fees, the lawyers, the closing costs.

It is a month in which your ex becomes an ally and then an enemy and then an ally again, all in the space of two days, as you hammer out negotiations with the buyer for the house.

Food is both plentiful and wrong, not what we would buy or eat normally. Instead of cooking real meals, we microwave frozen premade meals, eat them with compostable forks, and evaluate them for flavor as we work our way through whatever is in the freezer. Our clothes are clean but we are living out of boxes and hampers and suitcases, trying to contort ourselves like Inspector Gadget around the new butcher block countertops that can easily stain and the new paint job on the walls that may get marred or scratched.

You swim on, then, through the murky water, children trailing in your wake with trustful paddling, home becoming more distant with each backward glance.

And then, after a time, you see it. The contours of land and city skyline, glimmering in the distance at the horizon. A new home. You take a float break to celebrate, allowing your breath to become more regular, less panicky. You whisper a quiet prayer of thanks, and start for land.