Somewhere Between Four and Five A.M.

We’ve finished cleaning up our basement library and Ron has successfully installed all the carpet squares. They look great. Even the cats like them, and cats don’t easily accept change.

In the course of cleaning up we noticed things we hadn’t really paid much attention to in years, like an old cabinet full of my papers from graduate school, with particleboard legs that got wet for the last time, or a four-drawer filing cabinet full of papers that we didn’t look at anymore. I found stuff in there that I had forgotten we’d kept, like old copies of birth certificates. I also found things we don’t need anymore: old receipts for things like graduate school parking permits, preschool fees, and plans for a deck on a house we no longer own. Plastic bins full of comforters and keepsake clothes and toys from when my kids were babies. An old teapot someone gave us because it had a picture of “Sunday in the Park with George” but the spout dribbled whenever we tried to pour from it so we kept it on a bookshelf along with other small keepsakes of people and places. We’ve lived in this house for thirty years, so it was time to go through some of the stuff.

One night, after taking a small SUV-sized load of things to Goodwill, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and realized that I didn’t know the location of a bag of bedding I’d kept on top of a rolltop bed, to make it up with.

But we’re on to the fun part of cleaning up the library now, rearranging the books as we put them back on the shelves. And we’re reading as we go, because, you know, that’s why we keep these books, so we can dip into them whenever we want to.

I came across a book of poetry by an acquaintance from graduate school, The Last Girl, by Rose Solari, and remembered how much I liked the poems. I especially liked “Somewhere Between Four and Five A.M.”:

Somewhere between four and five a.m., the soul
gets restless, leaves the body. You wake

to the kite-string tug, know all you can do
is wait, filling the time with books,

self-scrutiny, or scotch until that filament of self
settles back in.

Years ago, you had a chance

for a different life. A door opened, but you
were looking elsewhere, listening to someone’s

bad advice, and didn’t hear the hinge creak,
the voice whispering, this way. Or perhaps

you did, but thought your chances infinite, told
yourself you’d come back.

You could always

come back. Those are the breaks, your mother would say
if she heard you now, and she’d be right. But

sometimes, you know you see it, that unlived life. It passes
quick, in the corner of your eye. You glimpse yourself,

what you might have been, a face that could be
but is not your own. She isn’t angry. But she knows

everything you have missed, and is writing it down.

“You thought your chances infinite” sums up so much about finding yourself my age and still living in a place I don’t like because of people I do. I remember my parents talking about ending up in southern Missouri and how they never thought they’d stay there. At the time I thought it was an odd conversation—they were adults, they could have moved somewhere else, couldn’t they? At some point, a few of us do end up staying in a place we thought we would move on from. At the point where a person sees all her choices laid out in piles of paper, she can see what happened because it turned out that there was no coming back; those other lives are just hypothetical now.

But we still have all the books from everywhere we’ve been, and soon we will have them out of the boxes again.