Equinox

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On the afternoon of the Worm Moon, I stepped outside to plod my obligatory 5 miles and a coyote tore east down the street. An old man walking a half-score of small dogs was bent over, petting one or the other. Holy shit!  I said. COYOTE! COYOTE COMING UP BEHIND! I yelled. The coyote disappeared, east down Flanders. I set off west. The sky was mottled; the air smelled of cherry blossoms.

*

Outside of our house on Grosse Pointe, though J. doesn't remember it, was a weeping cherry. For a brief moment in the Michigan spring, it exploded in a haze of pink blossoms. A month ago, I googled our old address, and there were photos from when I sold the house: my old bedroom, the kitchen with the chalk wall, the orange chairs, the IKEA pendant. I felt a hard knot in my stomach. A lifetime ago.

*

I spent the evening of the Worm Moon crying, angry as hell. We have water between the shitty vinyl floor and the subfloor of our kitchen. The vinyl has buckled and when I removed the threshold it was wet and smelled of mold.  The entire kitchen will need to be torn out. I haven't taken time off from work in almost a year. In the morning, I was going to have to wake before dawn and drive to the airport, fold J. and me into an airplane for the one millionth time, head east. Repeat 12 hours later, but in reverse. Repeat in full the next weekend. 

*

I am in Michigan now, in the same room at the same airport hotel I was in three months ago. There is no snow, but the dun-brown fields of early spring. Rain. When I stopped to watch the Thornapple River plunge through the dam, I could hear cardinals, an eastern bird.

*

I am taking the week off from work, have deleted my work email from my phone. I have bought boxed wine and cheese and chocolate and pears, as I always do when I travel, a kind of mimicry of when I traveled Italy with my college roommate, and we didn't have enough money to eat three meals a day. She hasn't spoken to me in years, since I left Michigan. It probably started before that, maybe it was always broken.

*

In the emergency room two weeks ago, the nurse asked both if I could be pregnant and also if I even had my period anymore. I am at the age I could be both things. My actual child will be 17 this spring, will graduate in a little more than a year. When i think of us, we are simultaneously  now and also me at 32, my five year old on my shoulders, my five year old curled in bed with me and the dogs. Both things are real and neither are real. He said I love you today as he walked away with his father. Tonight I will sleep alone, but I will have no responsibilities other than to wake myself up in the morning--not feed the olden dog, or medicate the olden cat, or get the boy off to school or get myself presentable to go to work, or figure out how the hell we are going to deal with the kitchen. What sent me to the emergency room hasn't happened again, my bloodwork was completely normal, but remains unexplained. 

*

Inside the hotel, a wedding. Small boys in purple tuxedos charge up and down the halls. Outside the hotel it smells like rain. Like wet pavement. Somewhere in the scraggly woods beyond the parking lot, birds are singing. 

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