Transplants

I clip the spent blooms from the lower branches of my lilac trees, knowing I won't be here next spring to smell their blossoms as I walk out my front or back door.

Its an act of love, really, this tending to a garden I will soon depart.

"Your yard is beautiful," people often say, as they pass by on their way to or from Fire Island Bakery, and I think: You should see it when I'm not in transition. When my Dahlias fill giant colorful pots instead of blooming alone in black plastic ones on our clearing above Lowell Point in Seward, our soon-to-be home. You should see it when my days are spent weeding and pruning not sorting through years of collected items--photographs, dishes, office supplies, toys, clothes, outdoor gear--and deciding what to keep and what to give away.

The Clover, Chickweed, and grass creep between my perennials, left on their own, they multiply and spread, a reminder that my hands haven't been as dirty as usual. With summer ahead of herself, opening blooms weeks before their standard time, most of my perennials stand petal-less, seeds forming, leaves turning brown. 

But yes, the gardens are still beautiful and soon, no longer mine.

If only I could take them with me, and the four Lilac trees, and the giant Birch on the corner, adorned with an assortment of homemade swings. And while I'm at it, I'll take the master suite Nick built with his own nimble hands, the rocks on the shower floor,  the Hemlock countertop and windowsills where I placed seashells, brought from Cape Cod to Alaska, reminders of the sand dunes and mighty waves of the Atlantic, my first summer home.

This is obviously not the first time I've moved, and two-and-a-half hours by car is a mere jaunt compared to two planes and thousands of miles to reach my childhood home on the East Coast, split between Watertown Ct. and Eastham Mass.

Still, I wish I could bring aspects of Airport Heights with me to Seward. Our neighbors who brought homemade muffins the week we moved across Anchorage, leaving our Spenard home two weeks after Olive's birth, if only they could come too. And all the friendly faces who walk by our corner house and stop to talk across our rose bushes, whose children end up hopping our fence to play on the swings, the way a conversation turns into drinks and before we know it other neighbors join in, prompting Elias to declare: "Its a mini block party!"

Airport Heights has been so good to us, and now its almost time to go. To relocate to Seward, to a mountainside home, with trees for neighbors, and views not of other folks' ranch homes but of the glacier-fed water of resurrection Bay. I'm an ocean girl returning to a seaside town, only one with giant peeks instead of dunes, not the Atlantic but the Pacific ocean, subdued as it moves through the bay to lap the beaches of Lowell Point.

We are returning to Alaska, as the joke goes, as Anchorage is more modern city than last frontier, and though I can't bring my beloved neighbors, nor my Lilac, Birch, Apple or Mountain Ash trees, I did get my hands dirty yesterday afternoon as I dug up Golden Globe, Tiger Lillies, Bleeding Heart, and Forget Me Not to bring to my new home.

Comments

[Louise]

I know exactly how you feel. Our recent move was bittersweet. We left behind wonderful friends and neighbors, who are going to scatter in time from one college town to another, and who are already much too far away to visit. And our little house, where we'd lived only one year, but was so cozy and fit us so well. We also left our son's great school, and it's magical garden, where I'd volunteered hundreds of hours planting, tending and teaching kids. It broke my heart to say goodbye to our son's first best friend, and to my friend, who had become as close as a sister, now pregnant with her first baby, whose birth I will miss... it hurt far more than I'd have guessed it could, since we'd only lived there two years. But like you, I feel things deeply, and such is the price we pay. I honor you for acknowledging both sides of an exciting move, as sometimes I feel like people try to rush us past the heartbreak to focus on the new opportunities. The loss is real, too.