We’ve migrated South, now.
Our new home is unpacked and placed.
100 some bins and boxes
filled with paintings, books, pottery, kitchenware, winter fleece, summer linen, photos, tools, kites, journals…
all the accumulated stuff of living 70 years
in an aquisitive world,
are empty, stacked, then
sold on the cheap via a local Craigs list.

Hung from iron shepherds crooks,
suet grills, hummingbird feeders. sunflower-seed holders,
are filled and waiting.
The birds are finding them,
tentatively, at first, then,
with ravenous spurts,
pecking at the food and each other.
Some of them are new to us:
Thrasher, Bluebird, Mockingbird, Carolina Wren.
And some familiar friends:
Cardinals, the Carolina cousin of our northern Chickadee,
Purple Finches, still nasty to their relatives…

Of course it is not at all the same
and while my name is still my name,
I learn again that I am not
the center of a stable universe.
The neighbors are not Debbie and Charlie and Arne and Mary.
And we have donated parts of ourselves
to the Salvation Army and Habitat For Humanity
(for we are, partly, what we own).
And we have strained ourselves and aged a bit
in the month long unpacking
so we ache in places unfamiliar to pain
and quickly fall to dozing if we stop to sit
for any time longer than a few moments.
And the uncertainty of certainty
has asserted itself into us,
making us realize,
the tentativeness of everything,
even ourselves.
In truth, we are not missed
as much as we would wish,
and, truer and sadder, we do not miss
that and them as much as we should.
And, as Nancy says,
“You don’t should on me. I won’t should on you.”
Here we are and that’s the way it is.