Walk Away, a memoir
Past Everlasting
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…
