Across the Great Divide

Across the Great Divide

If I have a theme song that’s it, especially the version by Nancy Griffith. (Click on the song title above to hear it.)

I’ve been walking in my sleep
Counting troubles, instead of counting sheep
Where the years went I can’t say
I just turned around, and they’d gone away

And I’ve been sifting through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
It was one that happened so long ago 

It’s gone away, yesterday
And now I find myself on the mountain side
Where the rivers change direction
Across the great divide

It’s kept me company, that song, through so many years and changes, up to and through last summer’s visit to Paraguay, where I took my sons to meet their birth mothers. That scary, huge, exhausting, necessary trip.

And now it’s keeping me company again, as I start a new kind of life once again. Tonight my partner of 13 years moves up to the third floor, not far away, but the first steps toward there as we figure out how to stop this thing that never really started in the first place.

Life is changing now, I can feel it pull in weird, sad, scary and sometimes exciting ways. The kids are home less and less, my dogs are getting older and I’m afraid that I don’t have long with them. As of tonight I’m single, though I always have been, really.

So I’ll be sifting through the layers, trying to see and understand what this next, last part of life means; the part without at-home kids, daily grocery runs and drives to school, or saying goodnight to a person next to me. As the rivers change direction across this great divide.