blessings

I couldn't look at him, so I looked at the trees outside the window instead.
We don't always get fall here, not like in the east, but fall gets a little longer each year.
They looked like stained glass, painting the sunlight before it reached the high little window.
Less like holy ground.
More like a eulogy.
I couldn't speak, so I sang instead.
Hold on to the ones you love.
I'm trying.    

I couldn't imagine the future, so I remembered instead.
Fire pit, his children now taller than me, 4am, American Gothic that would have gotten somebody fired at any other job.
I remembered the old song.
Maybe the memory was too ugly.
Maybe it was time for it to go.
You can't inflict peace, I guess.
But I miss it, because when I sang peace into being under their feet, their toes pointed doorward, I was also singing my own peace.
Peace within me, enough peace to let them go, enough to grieve, enough to begin again, enough to believe that the long overlapping chain of comings and goings was more than any one link.    

The Jesuit asked me once if I still believed in the mission.
Mission?
Mission?
No.
It stopped being about a mission statement when every night that summer I read her to sleep with the Secret Garden and walked home with her mania ringing in my head and knew that I would be staying another year.
Mission?
Mission?
What mission could I possibly name that wouldn't cheapen the lives around me? I am not here for G-d or the betterment of society or to preach or to fix or to convert or to do good work or to convince people about anyone's gifts or to prove how kind and patient I am like the neighbors back home or the people at airport security say.
I'm not here because I need to be needed.
I'm not here because I have nowhere else, although nowhere else would be like here.
I'm certainly not here for stability or career advancement.

Do I really need a reason?    

Maybe it's just the weight of ten years, or because my work here isn't finished.
Or it's because life is short, and I know someday I'll wake up on a Saturday morning and roll over in bed and realize that it's time to go but
for now I wake up and go downstairs to get my coffee and toast and remember all the people who have come and gone from this living room and all the people who have yet to come and go and
someday I will be one of them but for now we will be here,
content,
singing peace under each other's feet.