Mom’s Building

“I see Mom’s building!” my son shouts.

I peer out the car window and there it is. It’s easy to spot, a bookend on the Empire State Plaza that towers over the Albany skyline. My children still call it “Mom’s building” even though it’s been a year since I left, even longer since I regularly worked onsite. 

I wonder if it will always be my building to them. It doesn’t feel like mine anymore, a year plus a pandemic filling a distance between me and my old workplace, stretching far into the past. I never thought I would leave my job. I didn’t leave when my children were born, didn’t leave when the world shut down. I am a risk-averse person. I am measured and purposeful. But still I left. I left even when the fear and self-doubt told me to stay, left when my old boss called me and tried to change my mind.  

In a way I feel like everything has stopped, like the world has moved on without me while I’m at home, alone when my children are now at school. I am forgotten. But then I think of this past year, a year of more quiet than I have ever known. And I know it’s been good for me. I know because the tightness in my chest is gone and the momentary episodes where I couldn’t catch my breath have mostly disappeared. I’ve been resting, embracing the lull in my life as best as I can, but still growing.

I think of my dahlias in my basement, brown tubers wrapped in plastic wrap. Last year there were only a handful in my garden but they churned out bucket after bucket of blooms from late summer to frost. My dahlias helped me breathe; being in my garden helped me breathe. Every morning I would step into my backyard and feel everything slip away. The sounds of sirens faded, the traffic gone. My dahlias called to me, stirring up something powerful.  

There are more of them now. The single tubers I planted multiplied underground last season. They just needed to be planted. They just needed sunlight, good soil, and water to grow into something more. 

I’m waking up, I tell myself. There’s a restlessness that won’t go away. And maybe like my dahlias, there’s beauty to come. 

Cafe Au Lait Dahlia