Passing Through

We’re moving in four weeks but I planted lettuce. I planted lettuce because it’s spring and that’s what I do in spring and I need one thing to be normal. Also, I sowed spinach and weeded the flower beds and pruned the raspberry bushes.

Listen, I want to tell the new owners, if you keep harvesting the lettuce and spinach, it’ll keep growing well into June. And just wait until all the raspberries start popping up. And I guess I should give them a word of advice about the toad that hangs out in the herb garden (he scares easily, so no sudden movements when you’re clipping back the oregano), and the multi-generational mourning dove family that nests on the back porch and frequents the bird bath. (They like that water to be clean, please.)

I should make a list. How there’s a secret peony bush tucked behind the garage and a clover patch in the front yard where practically every other clover has four leaves. I’m not exaggerating. Look:

Meanwhile at the library where I work, I have been jotting down my daily tasks for the person who will take my place. When to clean the toys and tricks for hiding the scavenger hunt pieces and where the Youth Librarian keeps the special stash of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Oh, and the little seven-month-old who comes in every Monday with her grandparents? She will eye you suspiciously for five weeks but then suddenly, she will smile, and one day, when you’re across the room arranging a book display, she will give you a whole arm wave.

Wait, said my husband. Why did you plant the lettuce, when we won’t be here to eat it?

What can I say? Why prune the raspberry bushes or worry over the toad? Why do we do any of the things we do? Our last house we’d barely backed the moving truck out of the driveway and the new owners were hacking down the pine tree in the front yard. That tree held a hawks’ nest. You could see them sometimes, circling overhead, swooping and gliding, and who knows now where they’d land.

But who am I to judge? When we bought our present house, we tore out the old owners’ koi pond. True, the filter was broken and the pond was mostly muck and rotting vegetation, but there were more koi than we realized darting around in the murk. I gave them away, but missed a few, scooped those into a bucket, and before I could find a home for them, they were gone.

Snatched by a hawk, a birder friend said, when I confessed to her in tears.

I left them out there like sitting ducks!

Hawks have to eat too, she reminded me. You gave them a gift. (This is the friend who I trust will always talk me down from a ledge.)

Okay. But, but, but—what if the new owners tear out the raspberries or forget to clean the bird bath or turf-grass over the four-leaf clover patch?

(Jody. Meet ledge. Step down from it. Now.)

My last Monday at the library, and I wave back at my little friend, and then it’s home to a house I am just passing through, have always been passing through,

on to plant something elsewhere, scattering seeds as I go.