The creek is murky, brown, and rushing. Is it Spring?
I have only known Valatie in the winter. I lived here for two months before I saw the grass under the snow. I watched the creek freeze and unfreeze and freeze again.
I grew used to early winter darkness, below-freezing days, and seeing people outdoors only long enough to dart between a doorway and a car.
Now people gather on the sidewalks, greeting each other, catching up, laughing. Teen boys skateboard. People go for walks together. Who are these people? I don’t know them and they don’t know me. In my imagination, they all know each other. I feel like a ghost.
Last week, the woman at the post office who’d been handing me my packages for months finally seemed to recognize me. How did I like Valatie? How long would I be staying?
Until June, I said. It was strange to see that I’m already past the midway point.
Already the “I nevers” are piling up. I never went skiing. I never tried snowshoeing. I never even ordered a bagel at the Bagel Tyme drive-thru.
Time seems limitless until it seems finite.
This space was always meant to be liminal. That’s what a 5-month sublet is. A waypoint.
“There are people out there who don’t mind living inside someone else’s life for a while,” a friend told me, when I asked her how she sublet her apartment without clearing out much of her own stuff.
I think that’s what I’ve been doing.
Valatie, for me, has been a place of shedding. I have shed a lot here--ways of being, ways of thinking, commitments that no longer serve me. But I want my next place to be a place of rooting, of sprouting. Of living inside my own life. Of community.
Sophie Strand writes of the way in which the hermit crab, outgrowing its shell, must wait beside a shell that’s too big, waiting for another hermit crab to come along and claim the too-large shell, vacating its old shell for the original hermit crab. Strand tells us that sometimes up to twenty crabs can congregate, forming a ritual known as a vacancy chain.
What strikes me is the waiting.
Knowing that something is coming, but not knowing when or how. But waiting, because you trust that it is.
I’m waiting now. I’m waiting for my next shell.
