I’m learning slowly:  Holding on hurts. Holding on makes me angry. “Let go and be free,” a friend told me in a dream a few years ago. I’m still figuring out what he meant.

Tonight, for the first time all summer, I was lying in the hammock that Alex put up for my birthday. It was dusk and Bea and Thomas were playing soccer. The white of Bea’s nightie and the light patches of the ball glowed as the sky came down. No more lightening bugs. Still a few diehard mosquitoes. The leaves on the big maple above, holding on to the last bit of green, spread above me.

“This is all I need,” I thought.

Then I spotted the little crabapple tree.  Not so little any more. We planted it five years ago, the first spring we lived in the house. Planted it on our anniversary, just as we’d planted a lilac in the yard of our previous house on our anniversary, and a lilac back in Seattle in the yard of the friend who had married us as a thank you. In some very wishful moments, I’d imagined our ashes being scattered under that tree. Looking at it, I felt myself clutch and grasp. To memories. To what could have been. I grew smaller inside; the expansion I’d felt just moments before began to vanish.

******

The kids and I watched a movie – Penelope, about a girl who has to learn to love herself before the rest of the world can see her beauty. We all liked it quite a bit. I sang them to sleep, then sat at the end of the bed and meditated. The sense of expansion returned. I decided then and there – the idea just flew to me –  to start packing Alex’s clothes, to box up his books. It’s an hour later, and I’ve filled what I have boxes and suitcases for. There’s still much left to do, but I feel so much lighter; not spiteful – he’s had plenty of time to do this – but possessing forward motion. I am making space for the kids and me. This is our home. This is our right.

Every time I see that I can let go of a way of being that I adopted since being in this marriage – my fear of bills, say, or the messiness that grasps me like tendrils – I feel lighter. I’m not going to chop down the crabapple, but I am going to imagine for it a new purpose. A spring celebration tree. Something to decorate at Christmas. Give it a new job. I think it would like that.