ABANDONED BUT FAMILIAR

PINI’ve been trying to write again – getting up early but coming up short. Short of words and time and finding myself just sitting and staring at a mostly blank journal page with a warm, distracting cat and cup of tea. I thought I’d come back here, to this space where words used to flow regularly and in abundance to see if I could find some here in this abandoned but familiar place. Leaving this space, full or recipes and stories and travels, wasn’t intentional, but during our time abroad it just fell by the wayside.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what to share here, what my voice might sound like, or what stories or recipes I might share. It feels like so much has changed, so much has happened, and I’m different from the person I was when we moved to England, and am changed even from when we left England and set out for our travels that eventually led us back to Oregon, back to our home – sitting on the same couch, cooking in the same kitchen, cuddling the same kitty, sleeping in the same bed that we left three and a half years ago. We’re playing with old friends and visiting old hiking trails. It’s surreal to feel like nothing has changed when so much has. In many ways it still feels like we have one foot in England which is maybe why I feel so disjointed and uncertain in life and in words.

The weekend before last… or maybe it was the weekend before that… we went for a short hike at a nearby falls. It had rained a bit and the trail was sticky with mud in parts. As we walked along Roux whined, “Mama, I’m sick. I has a fever! I don’t feel well. I want you to carry me.”

“You’re fine, buddy,” I told him. “Let’s go!”

And he went, and we climbed up rudimentary stairs, and picked up giant, decaying maple leaves, and threw rocks of bridges, and hollered into a cave, and touched massive stumps that had been scorched and blackened by the Eagle Creek Fire in the early fall of 2017. The trail had been closed since the fire ripped through the forest, just reopened just in time for our return. It’s one of our favorites. Abandoned but familiar.

We hiked and we had lunch, the girls clamoring up onto a mossy rock below the falls to eat their sandwiches, pickle slices, and Halloween candy dessert. By the time we drove home with our kids’ muddy shoes in the back of the car, Roux was sniffling. By the time we got inside, changed out of our muddy clothes, and washed our muddy hands he had a fever of 101.7.

We’ve spent the last weeks mostly huddled up at home, mostly in our pajamas, mostly on our own, pockets full of tissues and emptying the medicine cabinet of cough syrup. This unintended but welcomed hibernation, maybe in part, is what’s led me back here. In assessing things it became clear that these past weeks have been the first truly still and quiet weeks we’ve had as a family in nearly a year, and in spite of the sniffles it felt good to be still and quiet. In the quiet moments of tending to coughing kids, and wiping noses, and making chicken stock I could feel words nudging at me – words that had been previously been buried in still-not-unpacked boxes, and amongst the thousands of travel photos waiting to be edited, exported, and archived. They hummed louder than the humidifier, more insistent than they’d been in a long while.

So, here I am, hoping to keep the words flowing for anyone who’s still out there reading this.

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