Writing For A Fall

Evenings are usually my strong suit. The air is cooler, and life outside the airstream is quiet. Only the river moving past appears to grow in volume. Blue berries are freshly picked and in the frig for breakfast, while tea slowly cools inches from the mouse I scroll words with. As much as I love to write, it is heavy labor to keep myself behind this desk as I write down from journals a thousand reasons to begin anew. Selling possessions at this sale and that is a contagious, infectious way of seeing what I own, or I'm owned by. Now I sit on the couch and wonder if I need to own, or be owned by anything...if that is all the sea and land that prevents me from returning to the great red road, and writing again with new stimuli. These are grand considerions I place on myself, the incredible yoke of owning nothing, and the marriage of leaving without one thought looking back: nothing to be stolen, lost, rusted to worthlessness (like my truck that now coughs down the road), stored in rented space for mice to dine and nest, and/or beg relatives for half room to harbor boxes to open someday...if someday ever comes again.
Returning to the Berkshires after nearly three years of walking is the Rumpelstiltskin of my life. I go to the markets when I want and need no food in hope of seeing a face that will welcome me back; that will remember my leaving and beg for an account. No familar faces come at me hungry. The rare faces familiar yawn a greeting as if I have stepped out and then returned with a drink. If you are about to leave all that is for three years abroad, do not take one step if it is merely to feed the imagination of some great return. I will tell you now that the curtains will still wave you in but all occupants will be different, even if they are still there, especially if they are still there. The spindly fibers that will be the same are simply the long term props, and they offer little to comfort a soul with hunger for a house. No. It will never be enough to return to if you too follow my leaving. But leaving for the leaving? Now we are drawing with markers and bright paint on the end of sticks and anything glourious is possible.
When the walk was almost over I promised that I would sit down and write this book before I take on another adventure; before I stand up and push in the chair...or sell it to buy new boots. Keeping promises to myself, and others is how I finished the walk. It is how I will finish the book. Come spring I do not know if I will be barefoot in a field of berry bushes, or somewhere closer to leaving...a leaving that really, is going home.