I remember the day Lily and I came home from our road trip. We’d left Utah on a Sunday morning and reached Seattle by lunchtime on Tuesday. Hadn’t driven more than six hours a day, surprised by how quickly it went. She’d graduated from prep school and been away for more than a year. The journey home felt more metaphysical than literal. Now she was about to leave again.

I got a Tupperware container and went next door to steal blackberries from the neighbor’s vines. The blackberries are a pain in the ass: the vines are like barbed wire by late summer. All year we deal with this, you might as well take the fruit.

I ate as many as I picked, imagining the neighbors looking at me through their window. I’d pretend I wasn’t aware it was their property as the boundaries are a bit loose and we don’t have fences. They should really cut them back anyway.

Lily and I went to the same Mexican restaurant we did the last time she left home, before she went to treatment. The place was tinged with memories of that time—oddly intimate and distant feeling at the same time—but it was a good place and she liked it, so I did too. Something about it spoke to her.

We didn’t have much to say and I felt I’d said everything I needed to, so we just sat there eating, looking out the window. Then we drove home and went to our respective rooms, and I wished I’d said more.

When it’s time to go and everyone is feeling sad the time is pretty much spoiled anyhow. I think of my mom the times we visited her in Germany and were set to leave and saw myself exhibiting some of the same behaviors: the nervous cleaning, the restlessness, trying to distract myself from the present. Everyone’s a bit off at these times, you just have to do your best.

By the time I get this far into summer I start to lose steam. Going to bed is my favorite time of day, that liminal state on my side, one arm flung above my head like a fencer. There’s that time and the other side of it in the morning when it’s still dark and I can creep down the stairs and curl into the corner of the sofa with my coffee. Then the wind-up of work mind online, clicking my keys like some oversized grasshopper. Every day is like this, more or less. You realize the days have been circling the drain and exiting the pipes, wherever they go when they slip away.

I have gone back to the vines to pick more berries before Lily leaves and put them on the counter in hopes others will partake. The fruit is best when it slips off with a gentle tug. All these metaphors surround us as if life is a dream we will wake from wondering what it all meant. The fruit is there to take for anyone who notices. A lot of it just falls to the ground.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, pacific northwest, parenting