Just Write {87}

There are two apple trees in the backyard. They stand watch over the chicken coop. Their blooms are a soft pink, almost white. This year they will grow more fruit than our family can keep up with. We will leave this home before those apples are ready for picking anyway. Someone new will pull them down (or pick them up off the ground, hundreds of them), and I hope she knows how to make pies or crisps or something.

The grass is littered with petals, like snow and the chickens peck at them and then drop them back down. Not tasty.

We’ll soon say goodbye to our three just-over-one-year old feathered friends. The kids are struggling with this and I am too. We can’t take every part of life with us. We’re talking a lot about the good things, the very most important things, like each other. We’ll be there together.

On Sunday we went to see my Grandma and I wanted to cry and then I’d stop myself and then I’d want to cry and then I’d stop myself. I sat on the couch like always and smelled the familiar smell of that home and tried not to think too hard. Grandma is moving and we’re moving and it feels like an uprooting in a way I can’t just write.

Then I pictured family roots as a kind of vine sort of thing that can’t just rip out of the ground and break off, floating down like petals. These roots are long and strong to infinity and so you can pull them and pull them and just keep going and they stay connected to you. Up in the air and wings grow out and those roots just trail behind you, the kite bird, attached to back there for always.

It was too cold for the end of May but we took Grandma out to lunch and then we stopped at the cemetery where Grandpa is buried. I watched my Dad for a moment and then joined him and Miles ran up and huddled up close to me to avoid the wind. I showed him Grandpa’s birth date and the date of his death and I explained why there was a flag there. We shivered and talked. I tried not to cry again. I miss him. I miss a lot of people and things about life long past. My Grandpa always gave a quarter to the one of us who could spot the water tower fastest as we drove close to town. We went for ice cream a lot. It feels now like it was very simple then.

When we left the house and I started to drive away, I let the tears come. Why keep stopping them, I thought. I suppose they are only proof of how strong the roots are.

This is the 87th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

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