Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Funny thoughts in the yard tonight, the late fall mist melting the snow under my feet, making mud out of the leechfield.

For no reason in particular I remember that summer near Kendall Square, fake wood paneling along the walk-up walls, leaving each morning while my roommates still slept with their students, the peace of biking four blocks along the trolley tracks to work in the spotlight at the science musem, employed full-time at last and basking in the glow.

A long time ago and far away -- before cat and dog, first child and second, each in their order, each in their time. In the hiatus, as it were, the false horizon before you and I.

Since them, of course, so many hills and horizons. A dozen homes shared, with others and alone together. A hundred panic attacks averted. A thousand parallel steps down dark paths towards light, in light, giving light. A million uncertainties circumnavigated.

And now a few of them are ours, homesteaded by law, made real by paperwork and time, made possible by a single chance and an acceptance of the real change day to day, the local spotlight, the little triumphs.

Once upon a time I thought I left each day to change the universe. Once upon a time I thought home was a place to leave behind to make that difference. Once upon a time I thought I could, both leave and terraform, a little at a time, however invisibly.

Now I accept that I will change some lives, and that it's worth trying. A year is more than a day; more depth, then, and so the spotlight turns outward, radiated rather than recieved. The right kids bump knuckles with me on their way to the bus each afternoon, grin when I welcome them into school each day with coffee wave and booming voice. The ones who need answers learn to ask the right questions.

But if I have a voice again, it is because you are my breath.

Now I know that the universe could not grow without you. That somehow, with you, there is this garden, with its unseasonable shoots pushing hope, defrosting where my feet have trod.

Once upon a time when we were young we had no house, no home, no love. And you were not there in the window, nestled in new striped library chair among new dark library shelves, the stable center of the universe, our smaller one asleep in your arms.

Oh! you change the world more than I, in these tiny lives, and mine besides. And lo, where once was jealousy, a garden grows.