In Transit Leah Browning When we left Canada, when we drove over the border for the last time as landed immigrants and went back to being ourselves, we went straight to your aunt and uncle’s house in Detroit, the one they’d owned at that time for forty-seven years, and were able to say goodbye to him—not knowing then that it was goodbye— before we flew to San Francisco. Under my seat, undermedicated, the cat cried in her carrier. We’d signed over our cars and almost everything we owned and here we were again, in limbo, in transition, in transit. The family of red-necked grebes floating on the surface of the lake crack open their wings, about to go up into the air or down into the water, but lingering, at least briefly, before moving on from this world to the one that follows.
25