For a Traveler

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story, about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine, their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen, all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was their son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood, the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction. And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself, having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June’s afternoon light as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me, and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left, and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then, and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?