Just Write {87}

May 27, 2013

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.

DadGpaGrave

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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{ 12 comments }

Adrienne May 27, 2013 at 10:02 pm

oh, my heart aches with you. I’ve moved a lot….and know those tears. I love your thoughts about the vine ~ we are blessed to have been strengthened as a family by our moves. I do believe it’s because the very most essential basics {us} move with us wherever we go. And we hold tightly to each other. And that’s been good.
Adrienne recently posted..No Law, No Limit!

Elaine A. May 27, 2013 at 11:18 pm

I would have surely cried seeing my Grandma while thinking of moving. hugs.
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Elizabeth W. Marshall May 28, 2013 at 1:03 pm

Ah this moving thing…you are heavy on my heart with the change, the leaving, the grieving and the anticipation of the new beginnings. This is so sweet and tender. I want to cry too. God’s peace in your move.
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Ann May 28, 2013 at 11:03 pm

Well this is staggeringly beautiful. Again.
Ann recently posted..That time I played women’s pro football. Yuh-huh.

Laurie May 28, 2013 at 11:14 pm

I love your words. Never stop, don’t ever. You are the most beautiful soul.
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Alexandra May 28, 2013 at 11:20 pm

It’s so hard isn’t it? I feel more and more untethered as my mother slides further into dementia. Who will know me then? Who?

xo

anymommy May 28, 2013 at 11:35 pm

I moved a lot too as a kid. Now we’ve been in one place almost nine years and I almost miss that painful goodbye pull and then the exhilarating breath of freedom as you face the new. I hope it’s a happy, happy change, Heather. I hope you’ll write about it all in this beautiful way that you do.
anymommy recently posted..A friend in me

Kristin Shaw (Two Cannoli) May 28, 2013 at 11:36 pm

Moving is hard. I moved twice, after ten years each time to a city where I knew no one. And here, in Austin, is the place I feel most like home. Yet, I had to be dragged here because I didn’t want to come. I hope your roots still feel the same once you’re here, and I hope that you find so much more beauty where you’re headed.
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tracy@sellabitmum May 29, 2013 at 6:13 am

Oh Heather. xoxo
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Ellie May 29, 2013 at 7:40 am

OH. Just, OH. I’m crying here.

This is so beautiful, my friend. Your vine is longer and stronger than most and reaches far and wide.

Thinking of you so often, and sending love.

-xo
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anna whiston-donaldson May 29, 2013 at 8:00 am

This is beautiful, Heather. And it speaks to something I’m struggling with today, right this minute.
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molly campbell May 29, 2013 at 9:01 am

Godspeed. A whole new world of adventure and friends you have not yet met awaits. Love to you. I am so proud to know you. XXX
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