This morning, when I was walking my daughter to school
here in Chicago (because, barring anything unforeseen
in the next eight years, my children will have been
entirely raised in one city, in one neighborhood —
and it’s not really a mystery why, is it?),
she said she doesn’t like these mornings when it is
cold but sunny; she likes a winter that is cold and gray.
I told her that maybe she’d like the Pacific Northwest better —
and that went in deeper than I’d intended. She’s been
thinking she might live there, she said. This was news to me.
How is it that I spoke in my father’s voice (It’s great to be open to
wherever the best opportunities are for you), not my mother’s
(Please stay)? Seattle is expensive and not how it was, I know,
and nothing is certain in anything a 13-year-old says,
I know I know I know. But I smiled at the thought of it —
what if, after all these years, that’s how I come home?
Funny life, how you break us in two, sometimes —
how you put us back together, someplace new.