Note from future-Sarah: This post was written before our move from Georgia to New Jersey, in 2022. Since then we’ve moved again (though hopefully for the last time), and again grappled with the roots we severed and the places we’ll miss. I decided to finally publish it because it still rings true, and I thought others might relate to it.
Creativity has always been a driving force in my life. Not a purposeful one, or a principled one, but a force that grips me wholly, and flings me down a river of creation like a leaf caught in floodwaters.
It comes in fits: long Decembers spent feverishly writing novels, staying up at all hours to write and write and write until the muscles in my neck spasm in protest at constant hunching over a computer; knitting sprees in which sweaters and miniature bears and socks bloom on my needles; long evenings after the kids are asleep spent with my face illuminated by the screen of my iPad, sketching; hikes into the woods with a camera to capture the beauty of mosses on tree trunks and sunlight shivering through long grasses.
If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
Tonight, I sat down to knit, but while my fingers were satisfied, my heart felt restless. Tonight, I needed to write to soothe myself.
There’s so much going on in our lives. They’re the same mundane things that fill most people’s heads: the fear of change, the enormity of taking care of children, the struggle of balancing work and life.
But tonight, those thoughts grew and grew until they filled my entire body. Until every child’s giggle and cry and footfall made me feel half-drowned when they compounded with the maelstrom of thought and feeling inside me.
Our move weighs heavily on my mind. It is such a modern thing: we’re packing our things in boxes from Home Depot and we’ve rented a U-Haul, but my ache is one of antiquity. It’s a severing of roots. The first, shy roots that we’ve put down since college. We’ve lived in this house longer than we’ve lived anywhere since we both left our childhood homes to come to college. We’d started to form community here: a network of people who we loved, and who loved us. With whom we could genuinely share both the struggles and joys of life.
I want to weep over the small family traditions that we’ll have to leave behind. I think of my parents living in Ann Arbor with me as a kid L’s age, and how we left behind Johnny Dew Drop, and the ice cream parlor with the spinny stools, and long walks with Slick-the-dog through fields made vast by my own smallness.
We’ll be leaving behind our tradition of getting drive through ice cream and then eating it while we go through the carwash. Of counting school buses on the way to school. Of counting how many lizards are sunning themselves on the rock wall at our favorite park, our eyes spotting more and more as they shift and scurry. Of dinners with Grandma Deedee. Of searching for river otters in the stream. Of getting gas station burritos and Michoacana popsicles for dinner on Friday nights.
Writing this down allows me to gather the memories up and hug them close. To make sure that, even if the minute-by-minute details blur, I’ll have concrete proof of them.
Feathery Thoughts 