Dear Hannah

"The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing." — Zephaniah 3:17

Dear Hannah,

You were three years old and you put both hands flat on the screen door and pushed it open and walked into the yard barefoot and I watched you from the kitchen window. You did not look back. You walked across the grass to the edge of the garden where the tomato cages were and you stood there and looked at them like you were deciding something. I do not know what you were deciding. I never asked. I watched you stand there for maybe two minutes, which is a long time for a three-year-old, and then you turned around and walked back inside and said you were hungry.

I think about that morning sometimes. Not because it means anything in particular. Because it was the first time I understood that you were a person who would walk out the door and not look back, and that this was not a flaw. It was who you were. You have always walked toward the thing you were looking at and away from the thing behind you, and I have spent forty years learning that this is not the same as leaving.

You called last week. Thursday, I think. You told me about the garden on your balcony and the basil that is doing well and the rosemary that is not. I could hear traffic in the background. Your kitchen is small and bright and the sounds that come through your windows are not the sounds that come through mine, but you were cooking something and I could hear the pan and I was glad.

I do not write these letters to say the things I cannot say on the phone. I can say most things on the phone and you can hear most things and we are, for all the distance between us, honest with each other in the ways that count. What I cannot say on the phone is what it is like to be your mother at seventy-seven. What it is like to love someone who walked toward something I did not choose for her and to have learned, slowly and not without cost, that my choosing was never the point.

You are forty-one. You have a son who looks at the world the way you looked at those tomato cages. You have a life I do not fully see and I have stopped asking to see all of it because the asking was a way of holding on and the holding on was not love. It looked like love. It felt like love. But love, I have come to believe, is the opening of the hand, not the closing of it.

I will not send this letter. I will call you Sunday evening, the way I always do, and you will answer or you will not, and either way I will have called.

With love,
Ruby