Tonight was our friend Mark and Val’s annual Labor Day picnic. We got there late – too late for swimming in the pond or horse shoes. The band was just starting when we came walking up the gravel road, having parked at the next farm down. There was a big table of food — baked beans, hummus, spinach salad with strawberries, a cheese plate, cupcakes, watermelon — waiting patiently for the two roast pigs to get done.

As soon as Bea saw Val and Val saw Bea the two of them were out in the grass, dancing. Twirling. Twisting. Thomas joined them and started doing his odd Happy Feet-meets-Lord of the Dance routine. I grabbed a glass of wine and a wooden folding chair and sat and watched them, remembering how it was a year ago that we’d told the kids we were getting divorced. I’d worried so much about Bea – just dreaded it – but as soon as she got the gist of what Alex was saying — and  he said it because I was certain I’d throw up if I did — she just scrunched up her shoulders:  ”Are you sure?” And when Alex said, “Yes ,we’re sure,” she’d replied with startling equanimity, “Well, can I go play?”

We were in a park  that we didn’t usually go to because I didn’t want to have to walk by it regularly and remember this moment. It was the same psychology I’d used when I’d chosen to have my abortion in Portland instead of Seattle twenty years ago.  Do the messy stuff some place else.

So we sat in the picnic shelter and watched Bea run to the swing set … Could it really be that easy? Thomas, however, was undone. Alex hadn’t even gotten the word out of his mouth when Thomas had wailed, “DON’TGETDIVORCED!  DO ANYTHING. ANYTHING. BUT DON’T GET DIVORCED!”  It was how I’d felt when my dad told me of his diagnoses:  Have anything. Just don’t have CANCER.  Anything else at all. Some words are bigger than the things themselves.

A few hours later, I’d taken the kids out to Mark and Val’s. I was still shaking, but I knew the farm would be medicine for all of us; it always has been. What I didn’t foresee was that the kids would tell everyone — immediately. “My parents are getting divorced,” I’d hear them say across a plate of chocolate chip cookies, usually to someone I’d only met once or twice. “My dad is leaving,” they said to a guy drinking a beer with a shot of Jack Daniels. By the end of the night, everyone knew. And Bea and Thomas learned that pretty much everyone had his or her own divorce story.  ”Did you know that I was married to someone else before Mark?” asked Val. Bea was amazed. Mark and Val are her adopted grandparents – the very groovy, dancing grandparents with a pond and a prairie and a veggie oil car. By the time the bonfire was lit and licking the night sky, Bea and Thomas weren’t so alone; they’d joined a big club, not unlike the misfit toys in the old Rudolf special. Whether you want to be a dentist instead of a toy maker or your parents are no longer in love, you are still a lovable person of infinite possibilities.

Tonight, it got darker but never really inky black because the moon is nearly full and glowing all buttery yellow. When Thomas and I walked back up the road to get a sweatshirt from the car, the gravel crunching underfoot, he marveled that we didn’t even need a lantern; “It’s like we’re walking into the dawn! It’s like that one planet from Star Wars.”  Everything is like something from Star Wars to Thomas. Nothing is earthbound. We returned to find everyone down by the pond, preparing to light the sky lanterns. A local actor who comes out to the farm every summer was holding one, while my friend C. looked on nearby . A few years ago, C. was nearly dizzy with love for this man, though he never had the slightest notion. It was the most serious case of unrequited love I’ve ever seen. She almost left her husband just for the idea of this person, for the heat of her yearning. Now, they stood just five-feet apart, watching as the first lantern filled with hot air and took off, gently in the still night air, and C. appeared unaffected, grounded.

C.’s husband lit another lantern, while Mark held it. A familiar song echoed down from the band. Hum hmmm…. what is it? Ah, yes. Gillian Welch, “I’m Not Afriad to Die.” And pow, I was back four years earlier in a Brooklyn apartment, where I’d played that song while serving artichoke soup, crusty bread and olives to a painter with whom I was in love. As Gillian sang this very song, he had sketched and we’d talked. Watching the lines appear under the weight of the black pen in his large hand had mesmerized me. I’d wanted so to kiss him. But I hadn’t. Instead, I’d watched the table, the soup cups, the olives appear on the page, ideas coming into focus through the interplay of his eye and hand. I wanted him to draw on me, lines connecting my heart to my hands and down into the very center of me.

“Nobody knows what waits ahead / beyond the earth and sky / Lie-d, lie’d lie / I’m not afraid to die.”

Gillian had been playing, too, in San Francisco. It was only three weeks ago, but I can’t recall if it was the same song, the same album. It was certainly her voice, though, that filled the room as I sat with a man — ok, let’s be frank — as I straddled a man and kissed him, feeling the whiskers of his beard on my cheek, his breath in my ear, his hands here and there. “What are you thinking?” he’d asked. Again and again, between kisses. “What are you thinking?” How can you tell someone what you’re thinking when you don’t know, when you are lifting off, filled with light and heat? Finally, my head was gone altogether – only my heart, my hands and that center remained.

The second lantern has risen and now a group of kids, including Bea and Thomas, hold on to the third. Someone struggles to get a camera to take a picture of them for it is a sight — six kids holding down a flaming white balloon, as though balancing the future with their looks of concentration and anticipation. Finally, they can contain it no longer and it takes off — up up up with an urgency the others hadn’t shown. It lights up over the pond, hurtling quickly past the big sycamore and then over the prairie and beyond out into the blackness of the fields.

“Forget my sins upon the wind / my  hobo soul will rise / Lie-d, lie-d lie / I’m not afraid to die.”