Walk Away, a memoir

Past Everlasting

Photo by Matthew Wyche on Unsplash

The past lives in our skins, our synapses, our laughter, our scars. It lives in places where our best and worst memories happened: warm meadows where we nested in long grasses, rooms with blood-stained plaster walls, empty beaches where we walked away.

I’d walked away from a violent love affair, and then from a series of less toxic relationships with men who left me feeling diminished. Each time, I promised myself, was the last time.

Then I met another man, who was tall and questioning and brilliant, who had his own dark places. I was fifty years old by then, and no one had hit me in thirty years, yet the thought of leaving my job and my home to move West with a man I loved terrified me.

I cried uncontrollably, I raged uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do, and my impulse was to walk away.

Instead, I decided to have faith, and that’s how I ended up living in Moscow, Idaho, and attending a small party at a house near Paradise Ridge. I was one of six middle-aged women who ran outside to see a great horned owl. Our host told us the owl arrived each day at dusk. The other women were avid birdwatchers who carried field glasses. I borrowed a pair to watch the owl perched on the triangular yellow Yield sign at the place where two farm roads met. “He’s magnificent,” said one woman. “He…