Saying Goodbye

The garden is planning to say goodbye. You can tell by the stepping back of growth. The way the weeds have reclined. The slow death of an encroaching fall.

I watch it from the window. My mind on separate matters. My heart torn.

I pack. Fold my son into manageable packages to fit into a teal blue suitcase especially purchased for the event. He is leaving me. Flying away to California. To the place his father hailed from. To hazy memories of a life long ago. To hope. Perhaps.

He leaves us. The tired, post celtic tiger population. The ones still shaking their heads. More so for the ones who never, quote ‘partied’.

We did not. We concentrated on our little piece of land. On what mattered. And still we suffered.

I am folding my son. Packing him away. Years of picking blackberries securely behind us I realise that we will not share that this year. Tradition it was. Each Fall. To go out to the back field. Climb over the fence with the old Beagle either leading us or choosing to follow. We had our little pails. Boots. Eagerness to pick. Jars of homemade jam on our minds.

I’ll miss that. His company. The slow comfort of companionship. The way our heads rose up to the sky or bent to notice a rare wild flower before it became lost to Winter. I’ll miss the way he noticed a bounty of berries in the rarest of places. I’ll miss our cache.The ceremony of weighing out our beauties.

And yet he goes. Off into the sky. The place we always paid homage to. The place we dreamed about as we walked the land.

I fold him. My son. Clever in my packing I know how to make the most of empty shoes. Cotton. I know how to bend jackets into almost being nothing important. I know how to navigate space. He stands and watches me in his shorts. I know he is thinking he will miss me. I know.

At the station we hug. I cannot speak. I try to tell him something important like always trust few and love many and always paddle your own, what, canoe? Life? I try to tell him how much everything we have ever been matters but I can’t because I am choking with emotion. I heave and try but nothing comes out.

And when he goes I am so tired. I walk back to the car with a broken heart. I am thirsty and broken. Thirsty as if all my emotion has drained me of fluid, of what keeps me going. And I look back to where he should be but he is concentrating on boarding the bus that will take him to the city and to the airport and to another airport and then on to another aiprort but I will follow him in my head. Keep following him until he gets there and until he finds the place he wants to be. To the place where he needs to be.