august 14 vermont

Light and color fade, leaving what remains of this August day ashen and gray. A cool evening breeze paws at my cheeks like the road waking me from my dreams. Lying here next to the window I find myself indulging in the sweet reverie of untethering—letting go from a place and a life I’ve come to know quite well. But generally, my final days in Vermont pass with no internal fanfare. This is just another relocation to another state—another city that is unknown to me. I’m writing to tell you that I’m leaving, and overall it feels quite ordinary. I have to thank my friend, Siloh, for that word; ordinary. Sometimes momentous occasions, like reaching a deadline on a years-long writing project in her case, or moving across the country (again) in mine, can feel like just another day. However, in my more sentimental moments, like now as I observe this strange grayness from my window, or like when I am alone in the backyard and find myself listening to a single mourning dove coo from the elbow of a branch high up in the old pine tree, I see the memories I’ve made during my three years here as small pieces of a larger, colorful mosaic. It’s in these moments when I think about the dreams I had for my life here. Dreams born from a year living within the ancient stone walls of Chiang Mai teaching a clutter of curious kids the basic structure of an English sentence, coupled with twenty years—between the ages of 17 and 39, to be exact—of one relocation followed by another. When inspiration (a stubborn thing) has always blossomed from my imagination and the possibilities that stem from new adventures in places unknown to me, how was I to sustain a sense of feeling alive while contending with the constraints of nourishing a life hidden in these remote hills? I’ve stubbornly shackled myself to the dreams I had for a life here for the last three years. They belong to these hills and I adore them. I can pry open their jaws now, slip them from my leg, and set them down in the stillness of a jagged piece of exposed stone ledge where, over time, a thick cushion of wet moss will cling to their rougher edges. Or I can place them at the water’s edge of some narrow brook at the bottom of two sloping hillsides where, perhaps by nightfall, a furry riparian critter will cozy up to their softer contours. I’m writing to tell you that I’m leaving. I’m emptying my dream cache and stepping agilely from these ridgeline trails back out into the world. Fresh saplings of inspiration have yet to manifest, but felt or not, the mosaic that is my past will inevitably grow larger and more colorful. I’m just writing to tell you that I’m leaving.