My daughter called this evening; in fact, she called several times today. I miss you, Daddy, her words said. I am sad, said her voice. And that textured, tangible pain somewhere deeper within her rose up and troubled her mind, and she began to speak of things that aren't, and imagined things that never were.

She is not alone in that practice, just as she is not alone in her passage, whether her trajectory is from one day to the next, or one self to the next. This morning she came from the house when I asked, fed the rabbit and gave it water, gathered her things to go to her mother's house. She waited in the driveway as I finished shovelling away last night's snow. You're so good, my words said. She seemed surprised: I am? her words said. You just turned off the computer and got ready and came out, you took care of your pet; your teachers know how good you are, and your coach, and probably your friends. You are loved and your are enough, my voice said. She stood in the driveway, arms hugging her clothing and her books, and smiled.

What a little sun will do, when you remember to shine it.

*

What I considered today, as I sat in my large and silent house — beautiful silence, deep as the night and bright as the day — was that I will soon be leaving it. If the market holds, if our repairs are concluded, if the right buyer finds it as we did, far enough away from the bustle, near enough the energy of town; if the transition is concluded; then this house will sell, and I will leave. Another room in which I have lived. What was this room?

I find that I let it go with less resistance, because I practice letting go. And because I have, with courage or blindness, chosen to enter new rooms, I have by nature and by design chosen to leave others behind. Here is what I will miss: stepping outside and hearing nothing but the sounds of the earth at night, with the stars as bright overhead as I could wish; the smell of cedar in the woodland walk; the open-throated shout of wind through the pine boughs; snow filling all this space and more; the river as it breaths in and out with the tide, overflows its banks, makes the road impassable; and the small yet indelible spaces I have shared with my children here. I will miss the last home I shared with my wife as we chose our departure from one another. I will miss the poignant ache between here and there.

What I will not miss? Most of all, the weight of unfilled potential: there was the treehouse the children wanted to build; and there, the path through the woods that we could have built, had it been "we". The gardens with flowers and with vegetables, undug and unplanted. The retreat house set against Fort Rock, under the cedars and beside the wetland stream, whose shutters were to keep out or admit the night, whose floor was to have a basin for burning wood. A few chickens and a couple of goats; a tractor that could not be purchased. The dream that didn't quite take color or shape, but remained confined there somewhere like a knot… like a nut… that wouldn't crack, to reveal the sweet and earthy flesh within. Less poetically, but equally true: I won't miss the plague of mosquitos and ticks, the demands of an aging house, or the space which was too large for a man alone to fill with life.

I am sitting in my writing room drinking ginger tea, my body aching with this season's flu, thinking of rooms. Everything, I have said, is in everything else — I repeat so that I remember, and say it because it is true. So if this room is yet another that I have entered and I will leave, as was this marriage, this country, the country before that and the one before, is this body not a room I will enter and leave? This evening? This thought?

I think of my daughter's despair last year. She had not known that destruction happens, nor that we are the phoenix incarnate. She hadn't known, and now has begun to learn: look, Daddy, I rise from my own ashes. That is not what her words say, but what is spoken in her voice. I can only smile, and maybe unspoken in my words (as she cannot hear them, quite yet), maybe unspoken in the voice (because experience alone can translate this), maybe written in the eyes there is something she can take, and hold close to her expanding heart: yes, my dear, you have closed your first door. Welcome.