I found the box buried underneath summer-stuff in a dank closet by the back porch door.
A long, shallow rectangular cardboard box addressed to me. The sender had gotten my last name wrong. A simple, seven letter name indicating Dutch descent, yet people constantly get it wrong.
Even Lauren got it wrong the first two times she wrote to me.
The box contained a replacement seat for a two-seated jogging stroller my sister and her husband had bought me a bit over two years ago now. Soon after they had given it to me, some of the seat fabric had torn noticeably.
Within days, my mother-in-law wrote an indignant letter to the company who made the stroller, demanding a full and immediate replacement. She noted that it was a gift to a recently widowed young father who used it to walk two of his three young motherless children every day.
They won't care, I told her. Write your letter, they won't care. No one cares. They won't send a new stroller.
You don't know that, she said. And beside, it's the principle. It's brand new. It was a gift. They should know that they sold a defective product.
A couple of weeks later the box arrived via mail. It contained a replacement seat, and nothing else. No instructions, no note promising a full replacement, no apology.
My mother-in-law placed the box by the back door.
The fabric of the stroller seat suffered no further damage and held up suitably under daily usage.
So, after a week or so, I threw the box into a far corner of that dank back porch closet, where it remained, slowly disappearing under the detritus of a family's life, until Thursday.
&&&&
In the immediate weeks and months after Lauren's death, I still held out hope that I could manage to return to my job and perform in a moderately competent fashion, and I would go into the office each day until three or four o'clock. I'd arrive back home by four thirty, about the same time my father would get home from his job.
Each afternoon around four-thirty, under all but the absolute worst of weather conditions, my Dad and I would take the two youngest children for a long walk. Evie being barely three years old and Riley not even a year and a half, the mere act of getting them into their hats and mittens and boots and snow-pants and scarves, and then into the stroller, left us mentally drained, but we did it.
We had to.
We both desperately needed some time outside in the fresh air and we convinced ourselves the children did as well. We would walk the streets on the quiet side of town, trying to time our path just right so that we would arrive near the train tracks in time to catch one of the freights passing through town; both the kids loved seeing the trains, and when they heard a whistle off in the distance they would yell with delight.
My father, notorious amongst his family and friends for possessing a generally quiet demeanor, would talk almost the entire time we would walk. He told stories about his childhood, a heretofore untouched conversational topic between us. He told stories about the few young widowers with children he knew from his earlier days; the stories invariably ended with the children winding up with an aunt, or a grandparent, or, sometimes, an orphanage. The words would pour forth from him; at times he almost seemed to fear that letting any silence fall between us on these walks would somehow weaken me even further.
I would walk next to him while he pushed the stroller. I would walk while he talked. I would walk and stare out at the world in utter amazement and despair.
&&&&
A few months later, as the summer rose from the spring, I left my job. My father and I stopped taking those daily walks together; rather, in the late mornings, I would push the stroller alone, sometimes talking to the children, sometimes talking to myself, but mostly just enjoying the general quiet, the warm weather, and the sensation of rhythmic movement, my feet marching up and down, back and forth as the wheels of the stroller rolled over the pavement. For the next year and a half, I pushed that thing every single day that weather allowed.
&&&&
So it was Evie, Riley, and Dad. Evie and Riley, couldn't have one without the other, a team. On the rare occasions I only had one of them in the stroller people who saw us frequently would do a double-take and ask me, where's the other one? A team they were. Until recently.
After consultation with the local school district, I elected to start Evie in kindergarten halfway through the school year; she may repeat, or maybe not, we'll see.
Now it's just me and Riley at home.
Earlier this week, the weather warmed a bit. One morning I asked Riley if he wanted to take a walk. Though I have continued to walk almost daily since last autumn, I had not taken the children out in the stroller since then.
He said he wanted to go, so I dressed him warmly and off we went.
It felt strange, to have all the weight on one side, to have only one child in there. I missed having the both of them in there together, talking and plotting and arguing and asking me questions.
&&&&
On Thursday I kept Evie home from school due to a nagging cough. Doctor said she's fine but she seemed tired. I asked the both of them if they wanted to take a walk to the supermarket. They said they did. I went out to the side porch to fetch the stroller.
I noticed a major problem with the seat, specifically the side Riley had sat on the day before. It had ripped to the point where it looked dangerous to sit in it, like one would drop right through the seat and down onto the ground.
Damn, I thought. No walk today.
Then I remembered the replacement seat, the one sitting, well, somewhere, I didn't quite recall where. I'll put the new seat on, I thought.
I rooted around various closets before finding that cardboard box in that back porch closet. I opened it up, got the new seat out. No instructions. This operation would be pure guesswork, and I am not one of those Handy-Man kind of men.
I'll figure it out, I told myself.
As the two little ones ran around, sometimes dropping in to "help" me, I worked on getting the old seat off and the new one on. A little more complicated than I had expected, and at one point I thought I might not manage to finish the job without assistance from another adult. I had to take most of the stroller apart, get the seat on, and then reassemble it.
At some point, though, I realized that I had the thing figured out and would have it finished soon, and with that knowledge a sense of elation overtook me. Only a stroller seat, but it somehow seemed deeply emblematic to me, emblematic of all the major and positive changes that I have made these last few weeks and months. Emblematic of the fact that I am, quite simply, doing very, very well now, re-engaged with life and, much to my surprise, truly looking forward to the future.
&&&&
Victorious, I loaded the two of them into the newly-replaced stroller seat and struck out on a walk.
And yes, I had a major spring in my step.
I thought of how up until relatively recently, the seat-replacement project would have utterly befuddled and then defeated me, leaving me a sweaty, swearing, angry man.
The sky above us turned gray but somewhat bright, as it so often does in this part of the world at this time of year; a thin layer of clouds hid most of the blue and most of the sun, but some of the sunlight bled through the curtain of gray. The air felt pleasantly cold.
We walked along and Evie and Riley chattered amongst themselves, and then Evie started asking me questions.
"Are Popsicles good for you, Dad?"
"They're OK, I guess, as long as you don't have too many."
"Are M&M's good for you?"
"Well, you can have them once in awhile, but they have a lot of sugar in them."
"Is sugar bad for you?"
"Too much of it is."
"Why?"
"Well, uh, it'll make your tummy hurt."
"Oh."
She paused.
"Are grapes good for you? I love grapes, Dad!"
"Grapes are very good for you, Evie."
A smile far brighter than the sky spread across her face.
"Yeah. Grapes will make me big and strong. Just like you, Dad!"
&&&&
A moment or two passed and Evie fell silent. Riley seemed half asleep. I noticed an utter lack of automotive traffic, and no pedestrians strolled within eye shot. No one around at all except for the three of us, no sound other than the wheels running over the pavement.
And then, as happens for me every once in a very long while, for just a second, or less than a second, time seems to stop, and the present seems to crack wide-open to yield a brief glimpse of both the past and the future.
One of the more memorable such instances of this took place eighteen years ago tonight, the moment I first saw Lauren. In that one moment, in the time it took to glance at her, I seemed at once to sense that I had known her in some distant past, that she was my destiny in this life, and that I should turn around and run in order to avoid some form of sorrow and heartache.
On Thursday, the yielding moment seemed to carry a simpler message. It just seemed to carry with it an utter acceptance, a resignation perhaps, that what had happened and what will happen is ultimately out of my hands.
And then the moment slipped away and the world moved again and I moved forward with it. I rolled forward and breathed in, as deep as I could, and let the clean, cold air move deep inside of me.
Cold, but still: I could smell the springtime coming.