Chapter One: 40 Bowers

 Late in the afternoon of May 30, 2009, I stood poised in front of my childhood home, about to close the door to my family’s home of fifty years for the last time. I propped open the screen door with my right heel and reached into the front hall with my left hand to pull the heavy door closed. I glanced into the living room and took in the bare floors and empty space. That house was many things over the years, but empty was not one of them. To see it stripped down and naked felt inappropriate; I knew it was time to leave. There was nothing left for me there.  My elderly mother had passed weeks earlier, and I had a new husband standing by in Warsaw, Poland.

The dog sat in the backseat of the  car, waiting for me to reverse out of the driveway to begin our new life. I sat in the driver's seat. To the left, stood the hedge I had delighted in pruning, first with a pair of clippers, and later, when I was older and braver, with electric trimmers. To the right was my mother’s rose bush, which I had fed banana peels and coffee grounds for the past decade. Other than the daylilies, lavender, black-eyed Susans and echinacea I had planted between the driveway and hedge years before, there were no well-wishers. 

Why had I not assembled a coterie of the neighbors I had known and loved my whole life? It would have been nice to hear a chorus of farewells that hot afternoon. 

As I left 40 Bowers for the last time, I tried to focus on the adventures ahead, but instead felt as if I were suffering from the decompression sickness that kills divers who ascend from the deep too quickly. Sneaking out of the first half of my life was silent and sorrowful.  

Up until this point, my 49 years had been an odd mix of intense loneliness and peripatetic exploration. Leaving this old life, I was hoping to turn a corner, squeezing out the loneliness like water from a washcloth. I had my dog Jersey, a new husband, and an exciting adventure ahead. Still, it was difficult to shake off  the emotional punch of leaving my childhood home, which would soon be put up for sale. 

I nosed the car along Bowers Road for the last time as a resident. I turned down Cherry Lane and paused at the stop sign, signaling left onto Westville Avenue, a street that three generations of my family had traveled along. I passed the high school on the right, across from what my mother had once told me had been a pasture for dairy cows. I turned left at the signal onto Passaic Avenue, retracing the route we traveled to my own high school, seven miles away. At Eagle Rock Avenue, I turned right and thought about cycling there as an eight grader, reporting on pollution for a science project. At the next light I turned left onto John F. Kennedy Parkway,  passing what we used to think was a Mafia restaurant, because it remained open, despite never having any patrons. 

This was a stretch of road that I had traversed often for more than three decades. On this final journey I took time to reflect. In less than 12 months, I had gone from being single, living in Manhattan with a car, a parking space, and an eccentric and adored mother in New Jersey, only to find myself, married, orphaned, and about to live in a foreign country with no language skills, no friends, no family, and no car. I remembered how when I had met the man who would later become my husband, I had found myself pondering: Where exactly is Poland, anyway?