For a while, this was the place where we felt safe.

Turning the key and pushing through the door means shutting out the worst of the world and enveloping myself in the familiar sights and sounds of us within these four walls.Leaving, as it were, paints everything about this house, our house, with shades of rose. In leaving, I am left to relive everything.

Sunlight streams through the wide bay window. Birds hop along the expanse of grassy lawn tucked within its frame. The windowsill bears the weathered marks and grooves of little hands and little toys over the years, basking in sunlight and lost in their own magic. “Even if I live to be 100.” I said. “I’ll never paint over those marks.” The wood is smooth underneath my fingertips, pockmarked only in places where toy horses danced along imaginary forest trails. I never will, I meant that. But in leaving, the task of erasing my sweetest memories is left to someone else’s hands..

Our garden runs wild in the wake of my neglect. Six months of will-we-or-won’t-we, poorly balanced with try-to-keep-things-normal-for-the-children has left our (admittedly never manicured but usually quite preplanned) oasis in a state of disarray. Prickly, purple-flowered Borage towers over stunted beets. Sunny faced Calendulas bursts from every nook. Their seeds are happy in this soil they have known since they nestled in last fall. Contented seeds reward us with endless bunches of perky green leaves, resinous blooms and the sounds of buzzy, happy bees. Tomatoes vine, unruly. You will find no neatly lined soldiers here. They sprout wherever they were dropped. If you brush your fingertips against their leaves, they smell of sun and earth and summertime. We will be gone before we taste their first fruits. No matter how close our departure draws, I can’t bring myself to end this—the growing. My girls run barefoot through the green, hopping from stone to stone and watching butterflies dance on the Elderberry blooms. They are in awe, and for that the garden stays. We will take a perfect picture in our minds that will remain far beyond our leaving.

In the evening, I settle into bed and drift in and out of a mother’s dreamworld. They’ve never been heavy sleepers, and all these years have trained me to exist in the nether between “awake” and “asleep”. Without fail, someone calls for me in the dark and I shuffle-step down the long hallway between our doors. The floor creaks in that familiar way and I step far to the right, avoiding that loudest of them all. When is the next time I’ll know and love the bones of a place the way I know here?