the Mission

The Mission

 I did it, Ian.

Carried 2 bags of your favorite things on a hike to the Arctic.

Decorated a white fir tree in your honor, hiking to a perfect spot on the side of a sunny berm, facing north. Draped her branches with bits of beads, strips of fabric from your work t shirt, 

Feathers, 

Coins, 

Pictures,

Even your truck keys, 

UIL ribbons and baseball medals. 

Precious things.

Irreplaceable things.

But things nonetheless.

I put my shoulders back and decided that, if I was going to have a "letting go" ceremony, it should be as outrageously over top as possible.

Just like you.....

That's right....Go to the top of the world, jump on an obscure mining road, and walk a couple of miles into the middle of everything.....

and then dare to look even further north....north of north of north.....find a small but perfectly situated white Fir tree......

                                                                          

nondescript, 

solitary, 

  and so young.....

More life ahead than behind, just beginning to start her ascent into the sky, I then decorated her with you.

A Canada Jay came down ad pronounced himself  suddenly and very loudly, and I knew you were there.......

And I knew you were pleased by the display.

 I breathed all that in,

Said goodbye

 And walked back south.

Back at our home.

Its been some weeks now, and I see what Marie meant. She said letting you go would allow you back in,

But first was a cleansing.

I felt like I had the flu, achy, tired and sick;

Then gradually felt a loosening; a quickening, a slow exhale. Changes happened slowly, like gradually focusing my eyes to a new spectrum. I began to sense you more around me; to think less of our other life. Like particles evaporating, the you that I knew before began to disappear, as the you that is now swelled around me.

Stuckness has gives way to a quiet and unmistakable sense of movement, oddly, more external than inside. I have abandoned trudging along the rocky shore and have stepped back into the river, lifted my feet ......let myself float. Look ahead.

And I am once again being carried downstream.

It feels like the right direction.

They say everything good is downstream, Ian.

I don't know about that but.....

I smile at the thought of that tree growing for 100 years to fruition and carrying bits of you with her, and this gives me a satisfaction I cannot even describe.

 It is just right.

                                                                 Love, 

                                                                                   Mom