“Well you went left and I went right
As the moon hung proud and bright
You would have loved it here tonight”
These lines are from Mumford & Son’s “Home,” a song Jim did not hear from here.
The beagles were anxious to explore their new neighborhood today, and I was eager to take my new camera with us now that my daughter has explained to me how its contents magically can be downloaded. (Evidently I dropped the old one on cement one time too many. It has solidified in place, its lens half-open but unseeing and immovable, like Lot’s wife looking back towards Sodom.)
I got this small point-and-shoot camera just in time to capture some last photographs outside our old home along with first pictures from where we have relocated. I realized only after my daughter explained the magical downloading process that all 366 of the photographs I have taken with the new camera are of the outdoors–as Jim’s almost invariably were.
The day I left our old home for good and did not look back, I had taken a final shot of that persistent lone heart-shaped hydrangea on a bush Jim had planted. It blossomed first in cornflower blue, and I was certain it soon would be joined by abundant brethren.
But two more seasons passed, and that single heart remained alone among the green. It recently turned a Victorian red-violet as it prepared to return to sepia.
On the tiny lawn outside our new home I have placed a heaping helping of the season’s political signs.
“Think you’ve got enough signs out there?” my daughter teased me, as Jim would have.
Love in the Spaces 