Faded greens in late summer. Not young and vivid, not anymore. The heat has been heavy on the blunt blades of green. The leaves are bent and burdened with their fully developed weight. The air feels sharper somehow, makes you more aware of it. The earlier days where time passing was measured by songs and spoonfuls of salsa filled scoops are somehow past.
How does time always surprise you like this? It’s like a lesson you can never seem to learn. That everything has an ending. Limitlessness is a myth that your youthful soul clings to.
This summer is different. There’s no college routine you can fall back into that will nurture your mythical idealisms. You’re starting a new path. You’re going to London again, but this time, with your fiancé. This time, with a wedding to plan. This time, as an inhabitant of a world that has been fully immersed in a pandemic, a world that has been awakened to social injustices on larger scales, a world that somehow feels aged, as if it is just becoming aware of the pain of wounds inflicted at an earlier time. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly was different than where we are now.
The breeze rustles leaves outside the living room window. The sound is deeper now than ever you remember. From this seat in your living room, you have watched your life unfold. As a blonde four-year-old, you celebrated your birthday in a plaid dress with a Barney balloon. Here, you put together a collage of pictures, personalized messages, and quotes for your eighth grade graduation when the leaning apple tree in the Old Mill Yard gushed with white blossoms that you admired on your walks home from school. You can’t remember who cut it down… or why.
On this couch you’ve celebrated what seems like countless Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, newborn babies. It’s the place you ate late night dinners after dance practices, the place you watched all your favorite movies for the first time. The place you read book after book after book. The place you sat after you surprised your parents and flew home from college for Thanksgiving your freshman year. As you’ve grown, this place has stayed the same.
Vermonters are known to be “preservers.” The landscape seems untouched by the commercialization of the rest of the world. That is why the fields on the ride to Wilmington have never taken on a different look. That is why billboards do not line the highways. Why dirt roads remain unpaved. But you have left Vermont, you have seen other things. Perhaps it’s not so much the leaving that’s important in your story, but that you let yourself fall for the unfamiliar.
The rustling outside the window has stopped. A lone bird sings in the distance. And, just for a slight moment, you feel the spirit of the little blonde girl in her plaid dress. She is still there, you have not changed so much that you are unrecognizable, I promise. I promise.
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