Everything that lives has to change in order to grow.  Every. Damn. Thing.  

And now, 

now, 

everything is changing.  

Conan came home on Monday night with the sad, shocking, and I guess I will say exhilarating at some point but right now I can’t see through to that part yet, news that we have been “asked” to move back to Texas.  Ex-pats are too expensive, it would seem, and we are on the high, high end of that budget item.  To say I am going to miss my newly adopted country and the friends I have made here whom I adore very, very much is like saying Donald John Trump, Senior is not the best candidate for POTUS.  And since I'm not exactly the queen of understatement, let me just put it clearly:  I AM GOING TO MISS MY NEWLY ADOPTED COUNTRY AND THE FRIENDS I HAVE MADE HERE VERY, VERY MUCH.  Though I knew I’d have to get off this crazy fairy tale ride sooner or later, we all wanted it to be later.  

The first thing I said was:  Fuck.  The second thing I said was:  What a sweet, sweet ride it’s been.  

I have written so much material about my life here, I have filled up a whole computer, an external hard drive, and a Seagate backup for my backup, and I've started on a new computer.  I started writing the first night we arrived, in the throes of jet lag, with new sounds in my ears and new words on my lips.  I have written through six transoceanic flights, three lazy summers, three white Christmases, two deaths, two new jobs (though they're more labors of love than jobs - my lucky, lucky gig as Poetry Editor for a magazine I believe in and my lucky-dreamy Wednesday morning yoga class that is all pleasure and hardly any work at all.), three years of school multiplied by three children spanning three campuses, and all the weekends and airports and car rides and Tuscan-hillside proposals and alchemy labs and birthday parties at the castle and belly-dancers at the bars.  I have written odes to the washerwoman in the woods and her chickens and her man's underpants drying on the line.  I have written stories and poems and articles and blogs, fables for the Frenchies, chapbooks for the would-be publishers who just don't know what they're missing, sections of an art book, poetry reviews and back-cover blurbs, and Facebook posts that ranged from highly caffeinated to highly agitated and back again.  I have written some crazy shit and good shit and some bad, shitty shit.  I have written letters and post cards and e-mails, love poems (some of which should be posted on Rat's Ass Review tomorrow or the next Friday in their special section "Love and Ensuing Madness")  ((Rat's Ass Review -- get it, Joe Schwartz?)) and rock-climbing poems, travel poems, confessional poems, political poems, lyric poems, beseeching poems and prayerful poems, poems about my kids, poems about Czech garnets and Spanish seagulls and Polish salt mines.  And I have written poems about nothing at all.  

But here is what I have not written, because I don't know how to do it:

I do not know how to write good-bye.