I fell in love with the Midwest, with the prairie, and with the biggest city it had, in love with thinking that I could move a thousand miles away from the forests of my childhood, and make something for myself that was only mine: a new start on the edge of a seemingly featureless ocean of grass.

Well, I could imagine that. I did, I wrote home, and I tried to convince my family and my father that there was a perfectly good reason for me to move away, that the cold and flat land didn’t matter, home as it was didn’t matter, only the home I was making mattered.

And I made it up for myself. Set between two kinds of waves: grassland and lake. Blown, banked by the wind, I settled into an imaginary boat of my own: rocking when afraid, gentled when embraced, hoping for company by not at all lonely.

Of course, in there somewhere I fell in love, and it ended badly, but that is another story altogether.

My father didn’t buy it, he never understood why I chose to live in a place without hills on the edge of a landscape without forests. He thought me too austere in the end. He thought I’d chosen to live without love. “Love of place, doesn’t count,” he said, “it can’t love you back.”

For a long time I was sure he was wrong. And then he died.

Then he died, and while he did it, I was back and forth from my new home to my old, for six months, while he died. Six months of wondering why I’d left, and six months of thinking that it wasn’t safe to be missing the love of people in order to love a place.

If you put the desire for home and the desire for love together in a pot they might mingle in a pleasing soup, or they might sit together, shift a bit, and separate, like oil and water.

So it is best not to try to make them sit together like that. Find one and don’t worry about the other, expect that it will come. But, keep in mind that if is doesn’t you may find yourself without it when you need it most.

My father loved trees, and snow and things you could make with water and wood. And when he died, I had only a new home I couldn’t explain to him or anyone.

I settled into it like a consolation prize with nothing but quilts and quiet and the simple slip of breath.

***

Sudden temporary upsurges of grief. S-T-U-G. STUGs.

That’s what they call it when your grief comes and hits you in the solar plexus while you are standing in line at the post office. And then hits you in the gut when you are lying next to someone you have just slept with.

Because you can’t help thinking, “This is the first person I have slept with since my father died. This is the first pleasure I’ve had in a wallow of grief, this is the first time I’ve had a moment where breath was all my own.”

And the craving that can come of finding pleasure amid the STUGs is a craving that is not a pretty thing. I know. I fell so hard for the first person I met after I lost my father, that I think I am falling still, though now it is not falling in love, it is falling apart.

At first the falling was from a hunger for life to come back - the breakneck hope that turned from being hope to being need so fast I couldn’t see it happen. Then it was the need itself that made it hard to see what I was craving in a clear way, and sometimes I convinced myself that I’d found love and home at the same time, when somewhere I knew I hadn’t.

But, oh, it felt so nice to think I had. And then I followed it. I used life and love and marriage as the chaser to the things I’d lost. I told myself that I knew the lesson from death: everything ends badly.

I thought, “How much worse can it get, if the premise of new romance turns out to poison its outcome, so what? Can it really be that bad?”

And I had a wedding, and the next morning, I took the leftover wine and my wedding bouquet and I threw the flowers into the little stream where I’d put my father’s ashes, and then I poured in the wine, and I told my father that I had found home and love at the same time, thank you very much.

And in my head, without asking it to be there, was the line from a poem I’d heard on the day I bought my used wedding dress: it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

And without my knowing it, marriage and hope and future were all facing me that day by the stream in their naked best: like an invitation to lose some more.


© Eiren Caffall 2009