The air in my daughter’s garage stifles my search
for my jar of coneflower seeds
packed in one of these boxes,
stacked and stored for unpacking later at my new house.
My garden shovel rests in a corner with the rake.

Sweating, I step outside
and think of last June,
leaving my lavender in bloom
rather than risk it dying from heat stress.
My life has always been this cycle:
a thriving, a packing up,
a waiting, an unpacking.
I learned the rhythm from a childhood in rentals,
the mantra of
“simplify,
simplify,
simplify”
intuited
before ever reading Thoreau in school.
My essentials fit in a backpack.
I know that moving demands
we weigh what we can carry
and gives relief
in the paring down
so we can start again,
traveling lightly.
And, what we can’t carry
remains hardest to leave:
a neighbor’s friendship,
the lavender in bloom.