The news is bad.

The terrible man in the White House with the manicured lawn has paved over the roses. He’s planting chaos with intention and settling seeds of hatred into the hearts of people that are simply too blind to see that they won’t be immune to the havoc he’s wrecking on an entire nation. He’s sending waves of men in shades of green with guns sprouting at their hips and from their hands to sow fear into the hearts of ordinary citizens on ordinary days. And at our house—no longer our house—Bermuda grass now grows where our garden used to thrive.

The news is bad, and it hits me in the chest.

The children are hiding beneath their desks again, or between the pews, or in the art supply closet, where they wait to see if their blood will intermingle with the watercolors or if they’ll be here when the school bell rings. I’m angry, because even though I know that people are people and not all were born with hands made to pull magic from the earth, I close my eyes and can still smell the spicy-sweet of those peonies on a late spring day, dotted with bees and so very alive. I’m angry, because the hands that hold the tools that snatch life from those school children should not have been able to access those tools at all.

For a while, this was the place where we felt safe.

Turning the key and pushing through the door means shutting out the worst of the world and enveloping myself in the familiar sights and sounds of us within these four walls.Leaving, as it were, paints everything about this house, our house, with shades of rose. In leaving, I am left to relive everything.

Sunlight streams through the wide bay window. Birds hop along the expanse of grassy lawn tucked within its frame. The windowsill bears the weathered marks and grooves of little hands and little toys over the years, basking in sunlight and lost in their own magic. “Even if I live to be 100.” I said. “I’ll never paint over those marks.” The wood is smooth underneath my fingertips, pockmarked only in places where toy horses danced along imaginary forest trails. I never will, I meant that. But in leaving, the task of erasing my sweetest memories is left to someone else’s hands..

Our garden runs wild in the wake of my neglect. Six months of will-we-or-won’t-we, poorly balanced with try-to-keep-things-normal-for-the-children has left our (admittedly never manicured but usually quite preplanned) oasis in a state of disarray. Prickly, purple-flowered Borage towers over stunted beets. Sunny faced Calendulas bursts from every nook. Their seeds are happy in this soil they have known since they nestled in last fall. Contented seeds reward us with endless bunches of perky green leaves, resinous blooms and the sounds of buzzy, happy bees. Tomatoes vine, unruly. You will find no neatly lined soldiers here. They sprout wherever they were dropped. If you brush your fingertips against their leaves, they smell of sun and earth and summertime. We will be gone before we taste their first fruits. No matter how close our departure draws, I can’t bring myself to end this—the growing. My girls run barefoot through the green, hopping from stone to stone and watching butterflies dance on the Elderberry blooms. They are in awe, and for that the garden stays. We will take a perfect picture in our minds that will remain far beyond our leaving.

In the evening, I settle into bed and drift in and out of a mother’s dreamworld. They’ve never been heavy sleepers, and all these years have trained me to exist in the nether between “awake” and “asleep”. Without fail, someone calls for me in the dark and I shuffle-step down the long hallway between our doors. The floor creaks in that familiar way and I step far to the right, avoiding that loudest of them all. When is the next time I’ll know and love the bones of a place the way I know here?