Currently

I drill cork strips into the exposed studs in our cabin and hang a cross-stitched goose wearing wellies into the first. I fill the rest with nature drawings from my children, weekly composer and artist rotations, verses to keep close. A Polaroid snapped in the kitchen of our Indiana home, and I am suddenly wisftul for all of it – a kitchen, an Indiana, our home.

On one of our last evenings in the Midwest, I sat on the back patio of my best friend’s house with our children running around the backyard shrieking like banshees, warmth still radiating from the hot pavers and the pizza oven and the late sun still visible, but sinking, sinking fast, behind the tree line and – then – bullfrogs, cicadas, a symphony of night. I remember thinking – you could have had this, but you’re leaving – and it broke my heart in an impossible way, and every moving box the day after and the day after that weighed more than it needed to.

I was wrong, of course. If this were an editing gig, if I’d have fished out my Anterique Stationers in red and resisted the Stet, I’d have crossed out the could have. I had this. I did have it, this beautiful life, this fairy tale friendship, the one where the kids love each other and the wives love each other and the husbands tolerate each other but mostly leave us to our own devices. I had it, the best friend just down the road, a few minutes away, the one where everything was so easy, so effortless, where our homes smelled the same and felt the same and every playdate involved at least two square meals, sometimes three, so much so that the kids could taste the difference in our sourdough (hers, undeniably better). 

Once, when my husband popped in to pick up the kids from Heather’s house, he surveyed the front room mayhem: books scattered, resined insects and all manner of scientific experiments on the floor, dress-up capes. He unearths a pair of socks to shimmy them onto our wrangling toddler’s feet before she says, No, those are Eden’s. These are mine! but they are the same sock. Same socks, same books, same kitchen timer, same living room mess, same routine, same energy level, same faults and furies and fears.

You two, he says, and we both shrug while finishing the same tea.

I could have had this, and I did, but I could not have it forever.

I switch from a Flat White to a London Fog, pick up magnesium and sleep tinctures in town. 

We join a co-op where my kids play chess, sing harmony, design apparel. We put 380 miles on the truck any given month, a proper use of cash as long as the windows are down. My oldest masters a French knot, my middle child can drop into a skate bowl now, my youngest has built her own bee oasis. Between morning eggs and evening curry, I find myself under the hot sun, nine feet high, securing 300 Teks screws with my son’s impact driver. 

My husband builds me a desk for my 43rd birthday, and we talk of a new writing project I’m head over heels for. I sign a contract. I finish the outline, the proposal, the first 5,000 words. Within three days, an agency email arrives with the words new beginning… no longer… believe deeply… fully committed… same level of vision. I know enough to know what to do next: say thanks and dream anew.
 

Still kitchen-less, I attempt a rosemary beer bread recipe in the slow cooker, three batches in a row. I call old friends and tell them how difficult it is to encounter tender moments – say, a widow at church, a birth announcement via text – and not bake something comforting to arrive on a doorstep. We have a grill, I say, but you can’t really send a Get Well Burger, you know? I laugh, but not all the way. 

On a Saturday morning last summer, a surprise rainstorm swept through, pinging off the metal shipping containers housing our well pump, solar inverters, a chest freezer. Miles away, my hometown was flooding historically at that very moment, and I remember thinking of the way we needed water and they didn’t, and how we – in the midst of wildfires – kept praying for rain and they – in the midst of floods – kept praying for sun, and how our whole lives can be such a dance of perceived needs and overwhelming desire, of what we get and what we don’t, of how sometimes our answers bring relief and others chaos.

I think of this now, in my own life, in three babies lost and uprooting a family to live a life unfamiliar to anyone we know. I wonder, sometimes, what we should even be praying for.

I volunteer to coordinate and set design for the weekly puppet show in a local sanctuary. I take a hammock nap. I lose myself in a local phenology calendar that reminds me it’s time to look for Vaux’s swifts in valley chimneys. I fine-tune my Cincinnati chili recipe, send trinket trays and wire art in the mail to friends. We bring home a pair of kittens – mousers, really – to keep the chipmunks at bay. My daughter builds them a custom duplex and we spoil them rotten.

I fly to Nashville to reunite with beloved friends from all corners of the world. They say I am glowing, and before I can stop myself, I tell them of the pregnancy test I took before boarding the plane. Positive. It feels miraculous, and layered, and I join the ranks of women I know who have used the word “cautiously optimistic” for twelve weeks straight.

On the flight home, I make a list of things I miss now that we’re living in the wilderness. I fill half a page before realizing there is a better list to make, and it is a list of things I have grown to love, things our comfortable neighborhood life never could have afforded me. I may not have wind chimes, but the clinging-clanging of the post-dinner grill spatulas as the dog pops onto his hind legs to lick each clean? 

Close second.

A few nights ago, in our eleventh week, I lose the baby. I lay in bed awake, counting the stars just outside our window. When the sun finally rises, I count flies in the rafters instead, embarrassed to have hoped at all. 

But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Sometimes hope is all we can hold.