“…for that day in the field [when] I’d written a story and made it come true.
Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a mostly good boy and fell in love. They had five babies, four boys and a girl and they lived in a house with five bedrooms and a basement on a Lane called Singing Wood. Her parents lived next-door, across 10 acres of fields to the east and her sister lived across the street in a house she kept just for a long weekend visits and a summer home. She had two dogs and a cat and the boys played her music on the porch every evening in spring. In the summer they feasted on crabs under the dogwoods. In the fall they burned fires and gathered with friends and every winter they buttoned everything up and settled in like bears fat and ready to rest and recover.
They studied and read and worshipped every Sunday and when the oldest son was growing ready to fly the nest he started to pause at the threshold. Not in fear of being unready, but with a hesitation in knowing one day soon he would cross through the doorway for the last time. He thought of this every time he opened the door to step out that last year, knowing he’d return that night but also knowing it wouldn’t always be this way. And she saw the look in his eyes, hungry to see what lay over the next hill and the one after that and the one after that. And the only thing that eased her sadness was watching his own recognition of this, and his hesitation every time he crossed the threshold. Because it meant she’d done something good. Something right. She’d built a nest that he knew would never leave and loved him so full of confidence that he had no idea of failure.
