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The Coming Change
On leaving when you’ve just found your place
In the forested cemetery park, daffodils are beginning to bloom between toppled headstones. Feather down drifts from nests high in the trees.
Tuesdays are volunteer days. Today, we’re using billhooks, traditional British hedge-making tools, to whack branches into stakes for the forest school classroom.
I park the pram beside the muddy path, out of range from flying wood chips.
“Won’t he wake up, with all the noise?” Asks one of the other regulars, a very frank woman I’ve come to like.
But baby is good at sleeping through sounds, so far. I work with the billhook until the wooden handle starts to threaten blisters on my hands.
I’ve gone soft, I think, grinning wryly. I know I’ve been away from home too long if I get blisters from an axe handle.
But we’re heading back soon.
I moved to London a little less than a year ago. Robert and I were looking at engagement rings, he had found an apartment for us, and we were ready to try for a baby.
I’m very lucky: all those dreams came true. But it was hard anyway: first-trimester nauseous, buried under a brutal grad school class, lonely in a city where I knew almost nobody.
“I don’t like cities,” I’ve told people when they ask how I’m finding London.
I don’t, but after a year, I’ve come around on this one. I have two friends with similar-age babies in walking distance. We take turns hosting lunches on Mondays and share baby clothes, toys, advice.
Healthcare is free: a clinic up the street, a free family center with baby play groups even closer.
There aren’t as many trees as I would like, but the cemetery park is more forest than graveyard — it’ll do, in a pinch.
On weekends, I have competing lunch invitations: my friend from dinner club wants to host hot pot and hang out with the baby. Another friend, we want to shower with postpartum miscellany I no longer need but she will soon.
We’re planning a “KitchenAid party” to gluttonously demonstrate all the attachments to the friend that’s holding onto our appliances for us — in the…
