We’ll dig potatoes on Sunday and carry the bounty with us. To stoking a new stove and hanging watercolor paintings on new walls and cleaning peanut butter fingerprints from new cupboards and finding out which windows have the best view of the moon in November. I look forward to walking many more miles, slowly, a little every day, stopping for every puddle and eft, with my children on a new path. Our neighborhood won’t change much but now we’ll share a fence line with a herd of cows and on the other side a wind-weathered orchard.

There’s a half built tree house Henry is going to make sure we finish, and plenty more work to do, too. There’s room for all of us there, and a little bit more. The river runs across the road with a crystal clear pool for swimming, a little barn out back I dream we’ll dine in. A garden with an old fence waiting too, for someone to turn it over, feed it, plant something new. There are paths of wildflowers, a rose bush that towers over me, and dye plants in every hedge, looking sturdy and abundant, like they were waiting for me to arrive. The new house was loved by a gardener once. When you make a choice for your children, for your family, with loving intentions and clear-hearted focus, it melts all the bitterness away. But leaving is not bittersweet – just sweet, really, just real, just what our family is meant to do. I will cherish our time here, and I have every intention of taking the uphill climb to pass its presence in autumn each year. We’ve walked miles in tiny bursts, up and down the road, we’ve seen sunrises and moonrises over the mountain and been buried under thick blankets of snow. One child has doubled in size here, another was born on a cool October night by the wood stove.

We have loved this tiny house all the way through we’ve cooked and made medicine with this land’s plants, we’ve eaten fruit from its trees, we’ve bathed in the water.

Only about a mile down the road, bigger, brighter, what we needed. We saw the house in July, made fast plans, and then got to waiting for September to meet us there. The cabin that has held us, sheltered us, kept us close will be passed on to someone new, and we’ll go about taking refuge under a new roof, inside walls whose stories we haven’t yet heard. In just over a week’s time, we’ll be gone.

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