John Steeple Davis: Rip Van Winkle's return. (1879)
Charles Maurand, Wood Engraver

"We returned sequestered and suspicious if we ever returned at all."

At some point after we'd relocated to Colorado for what we imagined would be the final part of our Exile, I started believing that we would be Never_Returning from that excursion. Our source had by that time changed too much for me to believe that we might find enough recognizable remnants of our former existence to believably argue that we'd returned, for time and passing circumstance had already pulled that rug out from underneath us by then. I didn't necessarily view this realization as tragic, for it seemed simply inarguable. We had once imagined we would one day return. Then we came to understand that returning might have never been in the cards, that the plane within which our return might manifest might have evaporated like a wave function upon the moment of our exit. Only constancy of perception could have ever argued otherwise. That constancy almost always proves to be little more than an illusion, albeit reassuring, until it isn't any longer.

If I'd been baited and switched, I had baited myself. Not being an expert at Being Exiled, I entered Exodus as if it might prove circular, a mere distraction on a much larger and more persistent playing field. But time inexorably moves in only one direction in anyone's absence. Perhaps absence seduces the heart into growing fonder as an antidote to the certainty that it only moves in one direction, to leave itself increasingly further behind. By the time I started catching on, my most treasured possessions from before times had worn out their original welcomes. The writings I considered irreplaceable had been replaced by better than I could have imagined before, produced by the Exiled me. Only our furniture, the lot of it the product of estate and garage sales, remained stable, and even that, according to our realtor when we started working on selling our Colorado place, looked out of place. We agreed to move our lives into storage so that realtor could stage the place for future habitation. That realtor uncomfortably confided that it had looked too much like a Grandmother's house. Our former lives likewise came to resemble a gothic novel, dated and inaccessible.

We lost so many to which we'd dreamed of returning. My brother's wife, Lana, who had been our friend and benefactor, died unexpectedly. We received word that one old friend and then another had likewise left us behind. My son and his wife started bringing my first grandchildren into the world, with me absent. Then my son and his wife separated and divorced, with me too far away to make much difference, let alone care for my grandkids. Our Step-Grandson, Hunter, after surviving more than a year of ruinous treatment to address a most serious teenage cancer, couldn't face the prospect of a recurrence. He'd died in the very house we'd hoped to reinhabit after our Exile, though it had forever changed in our absence. The GrandOtter grew up with us gone. She got into trouble, so we visited her in jail on one of our visits. Asking the guard for permission to dispense a hug and being directed to keep it brief further shifted my perspective. The world had we once mastered spun wildly out of our control in our absence, as if it had never been in anyone's control. My mom died after her long decline. We'd driven through a blizzard to return, stranded in Boise for several frustrating days. Six weeks before our scheduled return, my darling daughter Heidi died, leaving a hole the size of eternity for us to return into. I wondered who would be left to greet us on our return.

It was not by chance that we commenced to remodel and refurbish upon our so-called return. Our old house needed some serious work before we were Exiled. Despite heroic efforts by The Muse's son to hold the place together in our absence, the future could no longer be deflected by the time we reappeared. Old patterns had been terminally disrupted. We didn't even remember once-sacred habits, so we could not pretend to replicate them. We came home different. It has not precisely changed so much as rearranged. I felt reasonably confident that I brought back all my constituent parts; they just seemed scrambled. A few new sources of supply had sprouted, but few of the old reliables had survived. The Damned Pandemic was still raging, and we were masked like bandits when shopping. There would be no just bumping into people we knew when we were out and about, once a common feature of our small city living and one we'd held as the final evidence that we'd returned. We returned sequestered and suspicious, if we ever returned at all, to Pottersville more than Bedford Falls.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz