a time to say...

Goodbye bay windows and French doors.

Goodbye lovely, little dinky kitchen with black and white tiles and beautiful, old wooden cabinets painted white.

Goodbye mysterious periodical pee smell coming from the back closet, which we could never find a source for.

Goodbye streetcar rattling by below our third-story windows on a street with the fabulously redundant name of Lovejoy.

Goodbye four trash bags of old video tapes we never played because they were old video tapes.

Goodbye too many coffee cups.

Goodbye pocket doors that turned one main apartment room into two, the art studio and the bedroom, and that Stephen ritualistically closed every night when we got into bed and opened again with a creek and a crash every new day.

Goodbye too many vases.

Goodbye layer of kitchen grime built up on the too many vases that we decided to keep.

Goodbye ten minute commute to work.

Goodbye bottle of coconut syrup in the back of the cabinet that I don't remember when we bought and I don't remember when / how we used half of.

Goodbye stacks of chipped plates given to me by Mom, given to her by Noni, which I couldn't bear get rid of even though I have so many unchipped Noni plates left.

Goodbye view, far off against the horizon, of the off-ramp to the Freemont Bridge, suggesting the river.

Goodbye black and white checked hat, which was Stephen's grandmother's and which I wanted to wear in the winters but which was too big for my head.

Goodbye Stephen's old records, which someone in this building will have to have really eclectic taste to want to procure for their own.

Thank you mysterious neighbor woman who came into the laundry room and took the Prince, the Duran Duran and the grandmother hat.

Goodbye big grass lot down the block where Nicholas liked to walk, which I used to like to call The Old Pooping Grounds. [We cleaned up after him, of course.]

Goodbye periodic bear walking down the street that I would than realize was a squirrel crawling by on the wire just outside my window.

Goodbye two-minute walk to Kathy's house.

Goodbye horse rings all along the curbs.

Goodbye used twisty-ties and expired batteries and takeout Chinese soy sauce packets.

Goodbye carpet under the bed that Kitty threw up on and that José peed on, the day Stephen and I got engaged.

Goodbye big tree across the street that filled the bay window in our bedroom so that when we lay in bed, it felt as though we were lying in a tree house.

Goodbye nights sitting in bed watching movies and periodically looking out the window, past the tree, to where the rain poured off the streetlamp and made a spray of gold.