What I'm leaving behind

Take, take, take. I've been spending a lot of my time thinking about what I'll take away from this place. Last night, I got an email from Nina. She said:

"This might sound silly, but I think you should bury something of yours there, to ensure your return. Maybe a lock of hair, or some small thing of yours that you love. "

Not silly, but a brilliant idea. Problem is, what to leave? The movers have already left. Other than my family, they took pretty much everything I care about. I can't really bury my kids, though there was this moment with the Chinese wonder girl yesterday.....no, no, no. I still have my fancy NHT speakers here, as I didn't trust them to the vagaries of temperature fluctuations in a big old tractor-trailer ambling around on the highways in Ontario. But that's a pretty big hole I'd have to dig.

And then, as I was climbing into bed, I turned to look at the chair beside me. I saw it. I thought that I had packed it. I meant to. This little rock doesn't look like much, but I picked it up from the shore of Walden Pond in October. On a rainy afternoon, I scooped up my son in my arms, somehow coaxed my preteen in training out of the car, and we walked along the beaches and trails until we found the original site of Thoreau's cabin. It was something I had always wanted to see. Reading about it when I was a teenager, I hadn't expected to see it with my own children. Now that we were here, I hadn't expected it to be so deeply affecting for us. Even my toddling little boy, though a bit disoriented by being dragged through sheets of rain to parts unknown, soon got into the spirit of the adventure and asked to walk by himself, muddy trail ooze welling up over the sides of his little sneakers. The whole episode was a signal event. At the time, I couldn't put its significance into words. I still can't.

As we left the pond, I picked up a small stone. I knew that I shouldn't. Take, take, take. If all the visitors to this site did the same thing, there'd be a mighty hole in the landscape. The rock stayed in my pocket for a few days, migrated to a windowsill in the bedroom where I knew it would be safely out of reach of curious toddler hands. And then, somehow, rather than getting to a packing box, it drifted onto an empty chair beside my bed.

Later today, I'll take it to a trail that runs along beside the beach. There's a pretty little Waldorf nature garden set up there on an old stump. It changes with the seasons. I've written about it before, imagining that it was some kind of spirit garden. It won't be buried. It may not stay there for very long. It may even go into someone else's pocket. But, even though I'll never see it again, I've got a feeling it will be sticking around.

It means a lot to me, that little stone. And it's staying here.