Leaving Song

Ah well. We're slowly moving towards packing up and going home. This is a process which involves doing laundry and making sure all the sheets and towels are clean, the bed made up and everything ready for the next visitors.

I've gone through the cabinets this weekend and thrown out severely out-of-date foods and have finally also tossed things like cat pan liners. I have never even seen a cat on this island and feel quite certain we'll never have need of a litter box.
If there is a cat in this house it is a spirit cat and as such, its poop is not a corporeal problem.

I also bleached the hell out of the kitchen towels yesterday. The water here is dark and somehow greasy. It is a satisfying thing now to open a drawer and see relatively white dish towels. Since we share this house with a partner we like to keep it as nice for all as we can. We try.

And so it goes and so we shall go. We'll pack up the food we brought and didn't eat, our clothes and books and toothbrushes and load it all into the jeep and then drive to the dock and load it all onto the boat and so forth until sometime this afternoon we'll haul it all into the house in Lloyd and unpack and put things away.

It is a process but this has been one of those weekends in which the process has been quite definitely worth it.

And so we'll go, leaving the house and island to their own devices to do with what they will with time and wind and storms and heat and the coming cold. The birds and trees will not miss us. The pots and pans will be waiting when we return if fate decrees and the sky is very blue today, the wind a bit whippy and the bamboo chimes make their oddly pleasing clunky notes, the waves and crickets adding harmony.

This song will continue to play when we are gone and, like the idea of the white dish towels folded so neatly in their drawer, that pleases me.