Missing the Greener Grass.

     It's been so long since I've posted. My fingers are slipping to all the wrong keys and I can't quite get my posture correct sitting at this little desk tonight. I feel quite like a square peg in a round hole here. I've arched my shoulders and stretched my neck, adjusted the lighting and shifted my hands back to home-row. I'm trying, that's the best I can say.
     Aksel and I have returned to our hometown after ten years living away. We'd only moved three hours north but it was a lifetime apart from this place, it was our own space. We built a marriage, a family, renovated a house and moved ourselves, settled into a routine that was comfortable if not fully functional. Funny thing about that original move, we'd done it when we were young. We had such stars in our eyes and such big plans. Of course when we began it was a simpler life, a lot less baggage in the way of boxes and emotions and obviously fewer little people in tow.
     Since our extended family was aging and changing, new little people branching out the family tree among other things, a pining started pinging in us, a familiar calling to come home. The thought of being there for our nephews and our siblings, the neighborly raps on the door to call on a parent, rather than ringing them on the phone...it was all appealing.


     I laugh a bit bitterly as I think that it must always be spring in my recollections of this hometown. The ground giving way to beautiful blossoms and the smell of the rain and worms and earth everywhere. And the color- unmistakenly green. Like lightning has struck and the storms have electrified the grass back to growth, we must have been charged with an envious surge of energy to uproot our family and begin anew here.
It is starting over. It is vast and empty, white space and blank, like the stares that I can't help but give at my new job (at least it feels that way) when the tasks I am set to do make no sense.
     I can't speak for Aksel, I only know what I hear, but I can feel him spinning his wheels, both figuratively and today literally, as I pushed the minivan from behind as he gunned the engine to get my tires out of the ruts. Driving my van after being stuck was probably the most successful feeling of the day, a day that will probably never be a good day. We spoke about little at dinner tonight, he and I, attempting to partake in some ritual of 'celebration' that should belong to this day. I never know what to say. "Happy Dead Baby Day"? Doesn't seem politically correct. So we ended with blue cupcakes to share with the sisters and silence settling between us as we snuggled into bed.
     We're two years into this Grief business and not proficient at it yet. Perhaps I'm used to a private time to lock myself away and muse, to flip through the one and only baby book and touch the glossy pages unobserved. Maybe the current climate is mixing and muddling together all our sentiments, our restlessness with the weather and our perplexion at finding little green grass here, back at home, is most likely mucking up our optimism and hope. Spring will come and with it, air a touch easier to breathe, tepid temperatures to wade outside into, and soon enough a growth of color we may recognize as the one which drew us down here again.


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