I’ve been here before – 26/31 #SOL20

“It doesn’t matter how you see it, it doesn’t matter how your mind perceives it, the moon is always full. ” B. D. Schiers

We drove along sidewalked streets of the suburban neighbourhood looking for a place to call our home. We were new to one another, but we had done this before. This shopping for houses, for neighbourhoods and schools, and places for our children. The tending of lawns and mending of fences. We had pushed bums on swings, bandaged scraped knees, and cheered from the sidelines of “swarming soccer” – that was our term for the six year soccer players who gathered around the ball like a swarm of bees moving about the field where no one scored and they all played for the same team.

Finding a place mattered. We took our time and weighed each decision like an ancient treasure valuable but fragile. The bay window in front was the first tendril of imagination drawing me in, then the ornamental garden and the interlocking driveway, the wooden screen door and we knew this was the place.

We booked a viewing and it was late, the sun dropped quickly behind the houses across the courtyard, but we still wanted to see inside. Walking into someone else’s home had always felt like an invasion so my attention was reigned and cautious; I had to avoid picking up someone else’s life lingering in the objects. I walked up the steep flight of switchback stairs and turned left to the front of the house wanting to see out the bay window up above the living room one, it’s twin one storey above. This would be my first son’s room.

The sun was gone and the moon in full view, not quite full but familiar in shape and texture as something approaching completion. In that moment, some distant idea blew through me and landed near the tip of my tongue – I’ve been here before. My eyebrows lifted, he asked what I thought but I needed to think, so I just filled the space saying, “it’s nearly a full moon.”

There is imagination in the wanting, something vague and transcient, not quite yet ready for full expression. Not ready for words, but having been before. But it didn’t matter because my mind could percieve it, even in its absence.