Folly

There is always a house full of information to know about a man. In his kitchen you admire his ease and familiarity with items you’re too thrifty for; the garlic press, a juicer, a cuisinart, and Sylvia, the espresso machine that pulls divine cappuccinos every morning so that you’re no longer inclined to wake up in your own bed. In the living room you listen to him play the piano and the banjo and your heart learns to recognize his footsteps on the stairs and quickens as he approaches your front door.

With his mother and sister you walk the halls of his childhood home; wood floors are shiny and polished where they once were carpeted and stained, and in the garden, the pink azalea they planted when they moved into the house twenty-two years ago has flourished. Now the house is being sold. Will his mother take a clipping from the azalea to plant in the house downtown, where she now lives with her second husband? He asks her this, concerned. Azaleas can't be planted by clipping, by cutting and transplanting a single part of its being. The procedure is involved and right now she doesn't have the time.

Meanwhile, as you watch, you sit. You sit in the small, square kitchen noticing new things everyday; the inside of the door to the toilet is painted orange and teal. You sit on the uncomfortable leather couch he bought before medical school that has been badly but lovingly scratched by his cat and compadre, Miles. You sit on the floor in the study, leaning against the wall, watching whatever was next on his Netflix queue. You sit in each bedroom of the inn in the Catskills that his grandparents turned into a farmhouse, where his mother and aunts grew up, where he learned to hay and farm vegetables and hops. You sit on a quilted bed and imagine the kind of girls whose bedrooms these were and what thoughts were had as the 5 pm summer light fell across their knees the way it is falling across yours, now. You sit in all his rooms and sit in rooms that become yours together as you begin to move from house to house and city to city and years pass and all the while you've been wondering if this love has transplanted a part of you; the process is involved and you’ve given it the time.