Winslow Homer: The End of the Day, Adirondacks (1890)

" … anyone Exiled never returns."

Our Exile didn't so much end as pass. In the same way, a person passing from life to death does not undo what they've accomplished; their story continues in their absence. As this series might have demonstrated, my Exile, our Exile, remains a prominent presence even now, three years after it passed. It continues Passing. I expect its Passing to continue until I pass, too.

The final few weeks away were excruciating. We made the call well in advance to The Muse's son to inform him that we would be returning by the first of Spring, which meant that he and his family, who had been dutifully caretaking our beloved Villa in our absence, would have to find another place to live. He suggested we could share The Villa for a spell if their search proved fruitless, but we couldn't imagine how that could happen. Their stuff already filled up the place, and our's would, too. As it was, the basement was still full of their basement stuff when we finally arrived, precipitating a frantic move of that stuff before our moving van arrived. As it turned out, he had found a place better suited to his family's needs. They'd taken great care of the old place.

Before we left Colorado, we endured weeks of workers refurbishing the place. I packed and moved many of our possessions into a storage unit further up the mountain to make room for the painters and the floor refinishers. The movers had emptied the place by the day before we were scheduled to leave. An inflatable bed remained in what had been our dining room. The Muse and I finally managed to get ourselves scheduled for our first COVID-19 shots that day. We lined up in a Safeway® meat department to accomplish that deed. The Muse reacted poorly to the vaccine and was bedridden for the day we planned to depart. She lay there in the entry hall while the carpet cleaner worked his way around the empty house. She felt well enough to travel the following morning.

We took our leave in a fog of grief. My daughter had died on Groundhog's Day, taking her life after months of increasingly disturbing medical findings. Her doctors were unable to resolve her abdominal complaints and, after that last surgery, had started hinting that perhaps she could benefit from some intensive psychotherapy as if her pain was imagined because the doctors couldn't pinpoint a cause. Heidi was never anybody's victim, and she died refusing to accept what she shouldn't have found acceptable. Her departure left a vast permanent hole in our family. We were reeling as we packed up Colorado to head for home.

The Muse drove the car filled with the few remaining houseplants we hadn't given away. We'd given away plenty. Through our Exile, we conducted a few garage sales. Each observed a common pattern. Everything went for the same price: nothing. We calculated the cost of pricing, labeling, and collecting and concluded that we'd be better off just giving away what we didn't want anymore. This included that hide-a-bed and the Takoma Park larder refrigerator.

The cats rode with me, Molly uncharacteristically lying on the passenger seat with her head lolling in my lap. Max climbed to the highest point in the back and slept his way across. We crept down I-70 to I-25, then up 287 into Laramie and straight through on I-80 to Ogden, where we overnighted. The following day, we drove straight through to Walla Walla, arriving well before dark to find an empty house (except for the basement) waiting for us. The cats escaped immediately, and though I feared they might get lost, they returned in time for their supper. Within an hour, they'd somehow figured out how to jump out of a second-story window onto a roof, hop down onto the adjoining gazebo roof, and, from there, to the back deck. They knew how to climb back up, too. We set up the inflatable bed in the living room next to the fireplace before settling in, amazed that we were finally home.

I stood in the front window, peering down Boyer Street, a view I'd long considered to be into the Center of my Universe. There I was, poorer for the passage, returned only after a fashion, and in many ways still Exiled. I would never return to the place we left behind. As I've insisted throughout this series, the Hero never returns because he and his world utterly change in his absence. It was absurd for him ever to imagine he might somehow affect a return. He learned as we all eventually learn. This world turns indifferent to anybody's expectations. We experience. That's the extent of our control over events, that and our reflections afterward. Now that I'm a veteran of having been Exiled, I imagine myself less vulnerable than I felt that morning twelve years before when The Muse and I packed up our naiveté and headed East into a great uncertainty. Honestly, I feel at least that vulnerable now.

Being exiled tried to teach me that I would be permanently exiled and that there's no such thing as returning home. I tout my window overlooking The Center Of My Universe, but it's only unique because I consider it so. I could probably consider any place its equal, though it would carry less history. It was the distance from my history that made that Exile excruciating. To have no history in a place narrows perspective. It steals a dimension, leaving a flattened panorama. I now live very near the end of the modern distribution network. We joke that three other places have rejected the lettuce before it appears in our produce sections. Many would consider our conditions a cruel Exile, much as we found a couple of our greatest cities bleak Exiles, too. I'm better off for being Exiled and perhaps best off for learning in Passing that anyone Exiled never returns.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz