You can't go home again, not ever.

I drove to the coast last night, down the river road that winds like a tortured serpent along the water. There were plenty of cows to wave at, rusty red Herefords and later, stocky, compact Black Angus. A great blue heron was in the pasture with them, posed on one leg. The deja-vu thing was unnerving. A whole bunch of feelings came over me on that drive: angst, a little regret and finally relief that I would be leaving again in a few hours. I stopped in Duncan's Mills to check out the new emporium and antique shop, which was filled with murky paintings and garage-sale discards, very little that smacked of real antiquity, all priced for the affluent tourists who ply the road on weekends. At river's end, I stood on the cliff and watched the seals on their little isthmus at the mouth, laying in the lowering sun like fat slugs. Lines of pelicans flew in like 747's and congregated along the river there, too. It was all so familiar, and not mine anymore. Then we wended our way up the steep hill to the old house. The garden has bushed out and now truly is a jungle. All that rain last winter and spring didn't go to waste there. I ate dinner there, in the window overlooking the river, at a different table and in a different chair. Somehow I had pictured it as it was when my furniture lived there, as if it would follow me and still be in the little yellow house when I got home. Boo was delighted that he could wander around outside without me hovering over him and spent most of the time exploring his old haunts, a great sacrifice, leaving his usual post under the table anticipating tidbits. At the end of the evening, we drove off away from the sunset and the old friends and the little town on the edge of the world. It is much farther away than I remembered.