Not Every Question Has an Answer

“If you could stay put, would you?”

No. Also, yes.

A friend, on a four-person Zoom call, asked the question as I cried my way through telling of my overwhelm cleaning out the family home I’m living in. Part of the reason I’m still here is because the task is not done. And maybe I’m dragging my feet, because it will be hard—and scary—to leave.

Last summer, at my 55th high school reunion, a classmate (a neighbor, living on the property where she grew up) asked if I like living here on the hill.

Yes. Also, no.

Some questions just don’t have simple answers. And here I am again, asking “what’s next” and “when.” I don’t know the answer to that, either. But every time we ask the questions, we get a little closer to answers.

It breaks my heart to think of this property, my family home for sixty-six years, belonging to strangers. And, I want to create another home while I’m relatively strong of mind and body. I love living among the trees; the view of sky, valley, mountain; the coyotes howling in the night. And, I’ve never aspired to take care of acres as my father dreamed, recreating his childhood farm life. Two weeks ago, I scraped and stomped down 197 mole volcanoes in the meadow ahead of the mowing appointment, a twice-monthly task until the grass stops growing for the season.

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I drove by a sweet house for sale in Olympia the other day. I would have liked to live in Olympia, in a home of my own again. But, I’ll be 74 this week; there is precious little time left to get established closer to the younger generations of my family in Seattle (grateful that I have younger generations). There’s no longer time for intermediate moves. Sand is quickly passing through the narrow neck of the hour glass. I was a little wistful—Olympia is closer to my hiking life, and my sisters.

What if I’d left here right after my mother died, eight years ago? How would my life be different now? No answers.

A novel I enjoyed a few years ago, The Midnight Library (Matt Haig), explores lives the protagonist could have lived, but didn’t. It’s intriguing to consider life’s twists and turns, paths chosen, trails not taken. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . .” Or, perhaps, it wasn’t a choice, but circumstances that set the future, as in the 1998 movie, Sliding Doors.

Last month, I traveled with my daughter’s family to Sisters, Oregon, for my grandson’s baseball tournament. The Airbnb was in a development with houses and townhomes, manicured grounds with a greenway running through. Olders and grandkids, parents and strollers, dogs on leashes and kids on bikes went by the patio where I sat reading. I walked to the coffee shop in the mornings, bouncing with chatting olders when it opened at 6am. That’s what I want next on this aging journey: connection. No need for manicured lawns, but also not with an acre of mole tunnels.

Will I get to choose? No answer. I hope so. Tick tock.

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My sisters and I, trying to gather regularly to clean out the house, tackled the sewing and quilting supplies this month. Collecting needles from cabinets, drawers, shoeboxes, pincushions, sewing machine stools into a give-away box was like sifting stardust. My mother, my mother, my mother.

I sit on the deck and a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds hover around my head, on their way to and from the feeder, nearly empty again. I sense the presence of my parents. Are they here for me, or because this was their home? Will I leave them behind when I go? We’re here. We love you. Stardust.

We could hire someone to throw it all in a dumpster, but we would miss the stardust.

We put in the recycling box multiple sheets of paper on which our parents played Jotto—or Five-letter Word—on game sheets they created, and my mother’s lists of possibilities. Decades ago, they played it on trains and planes and at the dining room table. (Millennials did not invent Wordle, they merely wrote a computer program.) They kept the game sheets and lists, of course they did. Stardust. 

Last week, I gave 150 picture postcards from the desk drawer to a friend to send reunion reminders to her classmates. I’ve mailed two letters with decades-old, unused stamps from my mother’s obsessive saving. Slowly, surely. Repurpose, recycle, re-home. Get it out of here. So I can get out of here. When will that be? The third act comes with Social Security and Medicare (for now) and a lifetime national parks’ pass (mine has an image of wildflowers, thank goddess), but no crystal ball.

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If I could stay, would I? I do know the answer: No. That doesn’t mean it will be easy to leave. A friend says, what good is a life if we don’t miss the people and places that once inhabited it.