What It Will Never Look Like Again

This evening will be the last time to sit in this room.

This room with these furnishings retreats permanently into memory by the end of the day tomorrow. By that time a young couple will have helped Jim and me to consolidate our households and taken away a couch, an armchair, a side table, a dining room table and four chairs.

By day's end they will be sitting in a room a few miles away and for the first time they will be able to look up and see these items arranged around them. The empty spaces that had become theirs at a closing less than two weeks ago will retreat into memory. The energy of the rooms will change with each repositioning of chair and couch and table.

When they walk into other rooms in their new home, they will find an oak rocker, bedside tables, a console with framed mirror, even a washer and dryer. Slowly I will need photographs to remind me what each of those items looked like when they filled the spaces that I will exit by the beginning of July.

Sometimes new chapters in a life start simply. Other times they appear only after pages of carefully plotted foreshadowing.

Sometimes we know what we are doing.

Sometimes we couldn't even have dreamed it up.