It's important that the peonies come

I have never cried more while writing an essay

I.

I had the dream again last night.

I am always somewhere, trying to get home. It is always a little dark, and I always have this increasingly urgent sense in my gut that I should be getting home now, I really need to be getting home. Like when you’re out enjoying yourself somewhere and suddenly remember that you left the oven on, that perhaps the house is about to burn down.

Sometimes I am in Spain and have lost my passport. Sometimes I am in a slick shopping mall, one that goes on and on and on and has an underground metro and a thousand stores to get lost inside, and I can’t find my way to the train. Sometimes it’s a fancy hotel, sprawling and elaborate, beautiful and terrifying and impossible to leave. Oftentimes I am on foot in a foreign city, and I am running toward home, but the sun has gone down and darkness is settling and I can never move fast enough, can never arrive.

I have some variation of this dream at least twice a week now.

My friend, who knows a lot about dreams, told me to talk to my subconscious. To say to it, “I notice you’re trying to tell me something.” To tell it what I think the dream could mean—because perhaps if it believes that I understand, it can finally take a night off.

It will have done its job.

II.

This afternoon I dug up our peonies.

They sit on either side of our front porch, with its buckling steps and rotting railing.

When they bloom in June, I cannot get a hold of myself. I fall all over them. They seduce me, and they seduce the ants that crawl all over them too.

I hold them to my face and fall into a world where I am twenty-one, just married, living in an apartment over someone else’s garage, with painted plywood for a floor.

In so many ways this world is delicious. We have a hand-me-down leather couch that is so small we have to intertwine our legs to both fit. At night we drink beer and eat ice cream and watch Friday Night Lights. I am still finishing college and so is he; I come home with Dominoes pizza on Thursday nights after my late class. Otherwise, I learn how to cook.

We sleep in a king-sized bed on a box spring on the floor. Many days, he leaves for work at two or three in the morning, leaving me to lie there under the skylight, awash in the pale blue of the moon, feeling its luster seeping into my bones, making me worried. Weary. I plead with the heavens that he will come home, especially when freezing rain pelts at the roof or wind howls at the eaves. I worry that I will lose him, just as I’ve gotten him.

We bring home a dog, name him Pablo, and even when Ethan works late and leaves early Pablo is there, always at my legs, either curled up in them if I’m sitting or weaving between them as I move about. When we leave the apartment, we have to throw a Chicken Stick treat up to the top of the stairs to keep him from slipping out with us; it’s the only thing he wants more than to be in my lap.

III.

In 2016 we bought this house as a foreclosure. No one had lived in it for five years, and it had pungent carpets and broken windows.

We were delighted.

Ethan’s mother and father stayed with us for one week to help us make it livable. Anne helped me pick out paint for every room and taught me how to cut it around the ceilings. I was terrible and slow and messy. She was accurate and quick and splendid.

Glendon and Ethan ripped up the carpets and put down flooring we found at Marden’s, the bargain-shopping paradise of Maine. At night, we would eat takeout in the kitchen, surrounded by nail guns and hammers and used-up paint rollers, strategizing over the next-day’s work.

The first night we slept here, Ethan rolled over and promptly fell asleep. I watched headlights stream through our bedroom window and refract in the broken glass, which was held together with packing tape. We didn’t have shades yet. I cried and wondered whether we had made a mistake.

We told everyone it was our starter home, a 5-year home, a place to begin and nothing more.

Everyone laughed and said they’d said that too, forty years ago.

But still. We never invested in any type of art for this place. We never put up family photos. We never bought matching furniture. We held everything with loose fingers, because in our minds it was all so transient—and if not transient, then at least after the babies started to come, so apt to break.

The one thing I did do was plant the peonies.

IV.

I guess it’s a good thing I did, because five years after that week of renovations with Anne and Glendon, we did not move out.

What actually happened five years after we moved in is that Anne died.

It makes me think again of that word, transient. That’s how everything felt to me at that time. Because the girl who hadn’t wanted to invest much into her home—not knowing how long we’d be there—began to think it didn’t make sense to invest much into anything. Because of course, we don’t know how long we’ll be here.

V.

Next week we are moving—we are leaving this home and moving into a new home, one that we have built.

We have been here almost exactly ten years.

I hadn’t expected to even care about leaving this home. I thought it hadn’t meant much to me. I had thought that our time here was transient, just a passing through.

But what I am finding is that I cannot stop crying, abruptly and at the most unexpected things. What I am finding is that this house has meant so much more to me than I could have predicted, after all.

Last week a couple of friends came over, and when they were getting ready to leave, I said, “This will probably be the last time you ever set foot in this house.”

And one of them said, “I remember Vivian’s third birthday party, the way you made a table on the floor and set out all the tea cups and treats for the little girls.”

And she also said, “I will miss your Christmas soirees here.” And I remembered everything, all of it, and those moments were not just passing through, because they still live on and on in this space, like cheerful ghosts, like happy hauntings, like the spirit that makes this place feel like a home, not like some old foreclosure that two young kids took a chance on a decade ago.

I guess that’s why I had to take the peonies with me. They have quadrupled in size since I planted them, and they have marked the passage of time, June after June after June. There is so much that I cannot take with me to this new house. I cannot take Pablo; he will never work beside me in my new office, never lie in the crook of my legs on the couch. I cannot show my mother-in-law around and ask for her advice on paint colors. I cannot take the newlyweds who moved in to this place; they are grown up, different, changed. In a way, this house will hold onto all of this for us. But we must move away from it, and I would be lying if I didn’t confess that that makes me desperately sad.

VI.

I have wondered if, once we’re in the new house, I will stop having the dreams.

If my subconscious will finally feel settled.

If it can finally let go of the notion of transience that seems to haunt it every night.

I do not have a neat bow for this essay. I only wonder about the transience of everything, about our yearning for a true sense of home, and about the importance of planting peonies, even while we do not know how long we are going to be here.

Photo taken by Mariana Mosli

Deidre Braley is an author and editor, born and raised in Maine. She is currently pursuing her M.Div at Pillar Seminary and has a book on the spiritual discipline of delight coming out next August with Revell. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Shape I Take, and has been published with Inkwell, The Truly Co., The Way Back to Ourselves, and more.

Deidre is hosting a Nonfiction Book Proposal Cohort this fall! If you have a book idea and this year is finally your year to take it seriously, consider joining this intimate, 8-week opportunity. Find out more here or message Deidre directly.