I wanted my place back.

I pulled bright spring weeds, cleared the choked downspout that made the most quiet rain a cataract, reached down in time to raise dead leaves that I may have watched falling as we talked about autumn loving and apple pie.

I dismantled my swing and its sun-shredded canopy: each and every piece, every screw and bolt and nut, more thoroughly than I needed to, more carefully.  The junk man’s pickup truck would have happily swallowed it whole, but I salvage things more tender than scrap metal.

The swing was not a good one, just unsympathetic cushions on a rawboned frame. Laying across its two seats meant folding like an Incan mummy: face on elbow, neck bent against armrest, the phone and you tucked between my knees and my heart. But every stiff joint and numb limb was a bargain price for the bliss, for the peace, drowsing with you.

I could have replaced it with a better swing, a bigger one, but that’s not how I thought this magic worked. Of course I bought the same cheap swing again, and set it with precision where the old swing had traced its rusty ghost.

And then I sat there early on a soft May morning, on that same swing with the same plants in the same pots marking the same corners of consecrated concrete. The same me, more or less, waiting to accept that my place was not a place, not a where but a who.

I see the swing when I step outside to care for the plants (they’re owed their full season, after all), the canopy pregnant with rainwater and decorated in white and black and yellow-brown-green by the birds.

You remember the birds, don’t you? The ones that often sang behind my words and made you giggle? Those birds came back, but you never did.