I spent Memorial Day on a bike ride. It was slightly humid, one of those days where the sky promises summer but the air still holds the breath of spring. The sky, after days of rain, was blue. Dan and I set out from Washington Crossing and followed the canal path north, past wildflowers and poplars, crossing into New Jersey and looping back into Pennsylvania through New Hope, where the crowds had already begun to gather for Memorial Day.
Twenty miles of biking, much of it along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, a waterway once built for barges and mule teams, part of a hand-dug transport system that moved coal toward Philadelphia in the 1800s. Now, it’s a green corridor, lined with wild honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera), the scent of them pulling unexpected memories into the forefront of my mind as I peddled that day.
The entire ride smelled of fresh water, a smell that brought me backto the lake in front of my grandparents’ house, a lake that no longer exists. The dam that fed it is no longer managed by the state of Tennessee, and so it dried up. I used to swim in it with my sister, dare one another to hold our breath and duck under the dock, where you could surface again to draw breath. Now that cove is a bed of grass and rock, no longer a place where children jump from the top of pontoon boats over and over.
We crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey and back into Pennsylvaina in New Hope. The bridge was packed. We had to dismount and walk our bikes through the slow churn of people, flip-flops, kids with lemonade, dogs on leashes and some in strollers, a few other bikers. Every time I shifted my weight, my sneakers made static against the pavement and sent a little shock of electricity up my fingers through the handlebars. It felt silly and slightly magical, as if my body was saying: You’re too much in motion. Slow down.
My bike was a birthday gift from my boyfriend, a perfect one, really. It’s given us these long rides together, a rhythm, a shared experience, a way of moving side by side that doesn’t require too much talk. We are learning how to be a pair after divorce, both with children, separate homes, and shared custodies. We are learning to be companions without asking for more than what we can give.
Even now, even in relationship, I wonder what it is we really seek. There was a time, maybe in my twenties, maybe just before the marriage, that I sought something more perfect than was possible. Now I crave respect and steadiness and small moments of ease. And still I wonder: how do I find that without tying myself to it too tightly? How do I invite it without asking him to tie himself to it?
Down along the canal, the houses seemed to be posing quietly, each one curated with care. Here: a ring of tree-stump seats around a fire pit. There: a greenhouse standing proud and white. Then the new build, all glass and greenery on the roof. These are homes in the way a museum might have rooms, beautiful, intact, slightly distant. I wonder about the homes I grew up around. What would they look like to me now? If I stood on the lawns or walked the cracked driveways, what would I see?
I wonder where I fall in all of this. My home is a brick rowhouse in the city. Out front, a cherry tree (Prunus serrulata) grows from a small cutout in the sidewalk, blooming as best it can. My partner said my house would fit in the garage of those canal-side homes. I said maybe the mailbox. We laughed, but I didn’t quite know what I meant. I don’t know how to relate to the things I have and the things I want, how to recognize what’s enough or what’s worth longing for. I don’t know how to be settled.
Ambition feels like an echo to me these days, and I can’t tell if that means I am sad or evolving. Ambition is something I used to move toward with hunger, and now I am approaching it with caution. I am tired of striving. Of reaching and grasping, only to reach again. I want to learn, still, but I no longer want to chase. I want to be moved by something quieter, by something less demanding.
And I don’t know what that is. But I think it is akin to a desire to feel at home. And yet:
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
—Antonio Machado
I am, living in a house I love, though it lacks the yard I once imagined, and it is empty of others more often than I expected. After a life of motion—marathons, moves across continents, the founding of organizations, a doctorate, articles written and read—I find myself here, sitting still, and uneasy with the stillness. I am unfamiliar with the boredom I thought I longed for and a little too accustomed to loneliness. And, yet, I am definitively not quite ready to build the next thing.
I live in the consequences of a life shaped by transition. Divorce has made those transitions sharper, more frequent. Every other week, when my teenagers go back to their father’s house, I feel the ache: an empty nest, arriving too soon and in small, relentless increments. On those Sunday nights, devastation takes its familiar place in the room beside me. I can name it, but I cannot ignore it.
I wonder how to hold all of this: this restlessness, this grief, this stubborn thread of hope that will not let me go, the itch to reach for some next big thing. I wonder how to sit in this place without rushing forward or filling the hours just to fill them and how to invite companionship without clinging to it. How do I live inside the life I’ve made without needing it to be some other, shinier version of itself?
I do not have an answer, only the quiet company of this life, the questions that remain, the questions that arise, and the opportunity to meet them each time with the wisdom I hope I’ve begun to glean from this meandering journey.