Member-only story
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.
