The things we leave behind

We waved ARG off from the Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in Montreal last Tuesday. She was off on a big adventure -- backpacking around Europe with a couple of girlfriends for three whole months. We stayed at the airport for a drink, monitoring the line containing our girl until it finally snaked its way through the security screen and we could see her no longer. Then we stayed a bit longer and had something to eat, before finally wending our way through the terminal carparks to find the bright blue car (bbc) on the edge of the furthest most car park. I drove home as HG was tired. It was dusk by the time we left, so it wasn't until the next day that I found the hair elastic abandoned on the passenger seat.

ARG has been a dancer her entire life. Hair elastics are such an integral part of her, that seeing it lying on the car seat almost reduced me to tears. It was not only a hair elastic, it was a thick ouchless hair elastic, seamless so that no hairs get snagged on the metal join. A carefully selected purchase, bought with the experince of many years of inferior elastics. And, it was a lavender blue colour, a colour that I always associate with ARG. There was one year when the entire class of dancers at the School of Dance adopted lavender leotards as their class uniform because ARG had a lavender bodysuit.

Seeing the hair elastic reminded me of a poem by Sharon Olds about finding a drop of crystallized maple syrup on the table after her daughter had left for summer camp. I looked for it on-line and then I found this from High School Senior

"There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed"

And then I remembered lines from my own work about DAGs First Leaving.

I've been thinking recently about the things we leave behind. It feels attractive to carry little through life, to tread so lightly on the earth that one leaves no trace of oneself, except a brief trail of consciousness like the water vapour stream behind an airplane. For me, at this point in my life, I'm not sure whether it comes from a desire to disappear, or from a real place. For now I litter my office and my home, and write and knit and garden in a way that binds me to others and which seems somehow contrary to this desire.