jezebel. correspondence for the vagabond heart.

Yesterday, we drove the Rendezvous home for the last time. The road, green and dappled, winds from Brooklyn to our house, a 32.5 mile stretch of life, a changing life, changing lives. I cried as I drove, and thought about our last car ride together, not quite a year ago, when I held my mother's hand as she lay in the back of an ambulance. I took her home to die. We looked backwards out of the windows with our green eyes and we couldn't tell, on roads so familiar, where we were. The Rendezvous is no more, we are selling our house, and I wonder how I will find my way back to the pizza, the bialys and iced coffee, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, the black and white cookies, the smell of low tide, the beach, the duck pond, the madelines of childhood, teenage years, my twenties, my very early thirties.

I spent Mother's Day, our first Mother's Day without our mother, with my brothers and with my husband. We had brunch by the beach, we walked to the boardwalk. We brought flowers to Uncle B like my mother did on Mother's Day (he promised their mother, on her deathbed, that he would care for my mother, and he did, Uncle B, you did). We laid on the couch, we snuggled Bianca. Michael got mad at me and we ate dinner at our kitchen table. But, more than anything, we laughed. My brothers are my bringers of joy, and the sharers of sadness.

When we pulled up to the house yesterday, my brothers were waiting on the front steps. I need not a car to find my way home. My home is where they are.