The Mill and The River Vol. 2 #3

1) The news came to me on a Tuesday near two days ago when we were all in our home eating and drinking and cooling off from the hot summer heat, and it was near evening and Ron had started his walk down the path after cutting the tree more and telling me things while I watched him as he shuffled down the path while I looked on at the fallen maple and waited, looking over the thin brush, and soon after he clung to the rails on the mill porch, I quickly bent over and picked up three logs of wood and took them back to the barn and set them next to my garden pots for decor but also as a reminder so I could remember the tree long after it’s gone, and then when I sit in the barn and turn on the radio to a static electric monotone noise that is how I feel, and I hear that Gareth is shuffling around the city and his room and his life because he is about to leave, my heavy heart is sad again and happy again and full of adventure, not my own but someone else’s, which is something I hadn’t felt in a while. “The good news is that I was able to get on the move with my house in town and that will get me far away from here. You weren’t here so you don’t know how troublesome the winter was when the barn was falling down, and the water was flooding my home. I don’t want to be in the flood anymore,” he said. And the truth hurt for a moment because I wasn’t there to see it, and that is how it’s always been. Now, who do I talk to anymore, the girl from afar? the girl from way afar? Cities afar, hours afar, states afar—my quest for companionship is a punch in the wall. And these are always how these stories go: one person leaves, another arrives, someone stays, and someone thinks about where to go next in their journey. I tell you what—just call us molecules again, that’s how I’ll refer to the tree that has fallen, that’s how I’ll refer to the friend that is leaving, that’s how I’ll refer to the nights that no longer happen when all of my friends at the mill are no longer here to share a dinner and tell stories and be happy together for one night that has been many, and all we ever say is that there will be many more, and we can hope, right?

2) “I have said this before and you know this—my arrivals in Kansas aren’t the same anymore,” I say as I’m pouring my heart out on the patio of the granary, telling Tilly how sad it is to go home when everyone’s in a hurt sadness when it should feel good, and she says, “One of the most exciting things for me is to imagine my parents as young people, doing all the things just as we did at our age, kiddo,” she calls me. “And as your mother and your brother are in deep pain, sometimes I bet all they want to do is just pick up and run away.” In the country home, in the morning, when the man had already left and my mother was left to spend the morning with me, it was a good morning, with the fields across the road smoky and the heat on them, glistening through the tides of hay bales, and that’s when she started to tell me everything, and the grief, and the belief, of a broken window. And Gareth, who had been coming and going just as I expected, with that light in his eyes that comes from the joy of going to a new place, caught me before I walked back into the Mill yard and before I sat and talked with Tilly, and he said, “Ya know, I never imagined I’d be here for five years, let alone that first year I came to Vermont when all I wanted to do was get out of Jersey and out of the city.” And something my own mother says when her kids go away is that it’s not just our memories but hers too. They’re Gareth’s too. They’re Tilly’s too. They’re not only mine but everyone’s too. And he handed me a photograph from his pocket that he didn’t have to reach deep for and told me his mother went back to Jersey where she would wait for Gareth to tell her it was time to come back to Vermont and live in one of the rooms in the house, and in the photograph was the old sailboat and the friends and Gareth you couldn’t see because he’d taken the picture while swimming in the water, looking up at his friends and wondering how his life could get any better in that moment—and it was a good moment.

3) I do this thing now, now that there’s no one in the Mill to hear me yarn at first daylight—I just lay there for a moment and look out the window of the old writing room where I used to write and read and drink so much coffee that the tiny broken glass made me feel deep things, and I’d watch the cars and trucks and bikes go up the steep hill and down the road and stay away until late evening. I miss the days when I could lie down at night before bed and listen to myself breathe and think, and listen to my father watching television in the other room while my door was closed tight, and sometimes I thought I could hear him sniffle and scoff, which I took for a little sadness because it had only been a year since he and my mother split, and I may have said something under my breath but I was too deep in thought about how the day had been good for me, and all I ever wanted was for the day to be good for everyone. I don’t stop to think and stare off at the maple tree and the cupola and the river and the road and the bridge for no reason. I stop to think and stare at all the natural tendencies of a person trying to find beauty in even the most obscure things, when all there is anymore is so much motion in the world, so much noise, and did the world really think that the bustling freights rounding the forests of the Mill and going off into other lands could change me again? Show me the frugality of living this life in the Mill and I’ll make eggs and rice and burn the beans again on the stove and let the smoke fume out the window and over my pots filled with soil and seeds sown, waiting to grow on their own too, and so I begin my wait for new travelers to arrive, and John, who lives in the Colonial, looks different from the last night I saw him—his hair longer, his beard sharper, his glasses on, wearing a nice shirt—and he is older, and so am I, with my hair shorter and my beard longer, and the feeling of youthfulness is no longer the look I carry with me each day, though today I feel it, as it is the first of July and I can feel the change happening again and it’s all around me, everywhere I look, and the green sky and the blue trees mirror the green trees and the blue skies and it’s all the same but it’s happening fast, like the wind rushing down the river again.

4) I am a passenger on the train to life with a heart that’s full in the heavy rain that falls lightly on the steps to the barn where I write these words in synchrony after an evening that turned into night and then into day, a laughing and joyous fit of a talk between two strangers and nothing more, so I thought, as I paced around the barn and heard the wind talking to the leaves of the maple tree, its cheering branches scratching at each other to be detached so they could fly away. And only a year more, then I go back to California, she says, and I think I need to go to sleep, she says, as I look at the clock and it’s nearing one, and only talks as good as the ones I’ve had with strangers can last this long, as I am riding this train seeing one person get on and another get off and thinking about them until they become just a thought. And all I want is to have long, deep talks—though not everyone wants that, and I guess you could say it’s the one thing that blooms into flowers on a sunny day. And the definite thought of going again is what I heard, though it is a long time from now, so stay awake a little while longer; let’s write more poems that mean nothing but could mean everything, and time is all we can ask for.