miracles

The IRS wrote off the interest on my mother’s estate. Just like that, it’s over. I have to go to court tomorrow, or maybe not even that. and then I guess I never have to think about it again. Wild. Sometimes we get so used to our burdens that we mistake them for actual parts of our lives, and then they are gone, and that is that.

I’ll be walking up the mountains and repatriating my mother as soon as it sinks in that it’s over. I’ll stay long enough to feel it; an hour, a day, a few days. I don’t know. Since I’ll never know really where to put her, I’ll walk up from the spot that we got married, where we were all together in such joy, back in the days before, and scatter my small handful of ash into the soil of the riverbed, so that when the Spring rains come, they’ll wash down over the place we were married, the places I used to take my little children to play in the water, the bridges I’ve crossed a thousand times.

Relief.