(photo by Naomi Smith)

    

        Mom said she wished there was some way I could stay longer.  

     

      Instead, I left her.

                      

      Really, I knew there was a way I could've stayed longer in our two story white house on St. Anthony Street. But I chose not to and now, as I watched the flat dry land flicker past me through the window, I hated myself for it. I was going, she was staying. This, I thought, must be a mother’s pain – watching her necked, dimpled and soft skinned babies – leave her.

                      

      Life is filled with leaving. Like the time the first one left, the second and third all the way through the seventh - Each sibling with a different destination, each with a worthy pursuit. Mom sent them all away with bright eyes – glazed with courage - but her hugs were quick. I helped boot them off too, usually with a sleepy embrace on a dark morning - a morning much like this particular day’s – so early that the dew was still crystallizing as I shivered in the parking lot line to catch the 7 o’clock bus back to Lubbock.  

                   

      I remember watching them leave all those years, we felt them leaving too. The old cement walls in our house grew a little taller with every departure, the stairs above my bed creaked less; silence didn't always feel like a gift. One day, it was my turn to go. I wonder what the rooms sounded like the day I made my way to collage through west Texas’ cotton landscape, an ocean view of white as far as my expectant eyes could see.

       

      Five years later and here I was making the same trip; so familiar. The view was uglier and emptier than ever and my face, faintly reflected in the glass was equally as pail as the dead-grassed-plains. But I had to go back, I had to - one more time.  I pondered the decisions that waited for me in Lubbock.  There were people I knew I needed to say good-bye to, more people to hug. There were things worth finishing before I had to leave, again.