Lisa Timpf

Good Reasons

Visiting our old neighbourhood, driving down the country roads, fresh air streaming through the truck's open windows, patchwork fields bright under the clarity of the blue sky, we pass the forested property we sold three years ago. Slowly, the truck rolls past our former acreage, with the trails winding between towering white pines, multi-branched red oaks, sky-reaching sugar maples, beech trees with their grey, slightly wrinkled bark that always reminded me of elephants' legs. I imagine, hidden among the trees, the shy deer, the slow-moving porcupines, the ever-curious raccoons with their busy hands, the majestic pileated woodpeckers. The ridge where we buried two dogs that died of old age.

What were we thinking, to leave there? Like a panic it seizes me, this realization that the sands of time can't be stuffed back into the hourglass.

It was time, I tell myself. We were getting too old to look after such a big place. We wanted to be closer to family, to free up some of the money we had tied up.

And yet, and yet.

I had forgotten how beautiful that old dirt side-road could look, with sunlight shifting through the canopy of leaves.

summer breeze –
oldies tunes on the radio
stirring yearnings