Passing Through

We met for coffee on our first day here, and Mr. Harbor was looking back.

“Even as a child, I was always a bit quirky,” he said. “Once I wrote the time on a piece of paper, rolled it up, and placed it in the archway of a long row of terraced houses.”

“Like a time capsule?” I asked.

“Yes. My cousin found it and wondered what it meant. Another time, while waiting to catch the train, I was seized with emotion and wrote my name on the signal box. It was there for ages. No one ever knew whose name it was or why it was there.”

It’s an understandable impulse, the yearning to be remembered, to leave some evidence of having passed through.

Here in this old city, wandering around with no real agenda, I have a sense of being both recent and ephemeral.

We are staying in a neighborhood called Summertown on the north end of Oxford, with rows of brick houses lining the street and a cluster of shops along Banbury.

One evening we could hear a congregation of voices singing hymns in the church across the way, and helicopters circling inexplicably overhead.

At night if I can't sleep, I watch the occasional beams of headlights from passing cars sweep across the ceiling.

It's funny how an uncharted place becomes a base and begins to feel like home. Jill brought us daffodils which we arranged in a vase from a nearby charity shop. We went grocery shopping -- there's milk and juice in the fridge now, olives and cereal, a lemon and a cheap bottle of Chilean red on the shelf, a loaf of crusty bread from the bakery. We have our cell phones, WiFi, a good hot shower -- we want for nothing.

On Sunday we met our daughter at the train station and took a short trip to a small town called Charlbury on the edge of the Wychwood forest and the Cotswolds. We went for a green grassy walk along a bridal path, marveling at handsome old trees, strolling through pastures of sheep and cows, and circling back into town for a meal in a pub. It was a gray day, seamless andunpunctuated, but it's fun when we go out walking together, the three of us, just like old times.

I see our daughter in a flickering light, one moment womanly and self-contained, and then a little girl, at various times mysterious, vulnerable, charming. Occasionally exasperating. Mostly just loved.

She's living life here. We're only looking in.

One morning Monte and I walked into the city center of Oxford and to the botanical gardens, where I had hoped to see some irises. Turned out it was way too early in the season: there was a lot of preparation and grooming going on, but it was like going backstage weeks before a performance. The euphorbia plants seemed to be in their glory, though, which tickled me because we have one at home. And of course there was the greenhouse, where the air is always warm and fragrant with orange blossoms, where I sit and tend to sigh. I think that is my place.

There was a windy walk with Jill and Peter yesterday in the Vale of the White Horse, and dinner last night with their friends who live in this very neighborhood in a welcoming house that holds a lot of history and plenty of flowers. Dinner was a variation on Chicken Normandy accompanied by an "aggressively European" red wine, two puddings, and good conversation. Afterwards, Monte and I walked back, arm in arm, feeling almost local.

And there has been the morning in which I still linger. A catch-up time. Sitting comfortably and contentedly in this tiny apartment even though we could be exploring all that's Out There, and realizing that this, too, is a part of travel. Until tomorrow morning, we have made this space our own. We'll leave behind an empty vase, washed clean.