I arrived in Atlanta in a driving rain, at the tail end of a tropical depression that had raged inland from the coast.  Had I checked the weather forecast that day, I may have cancelled my flight from Albuquerque.  But, I hadn’t checked and the flight came in on schedule.  I needed to rent a car, venture out in rush hour traffic and have the rain and dark crash down upon me as I drove to my house in Duluth for the last time.  It was early October, before the leaves had a chance to change.

After many months of being on the market, my beloved home was finally sold to the lowest bidder.  I had left my lush Southern gardens for high and dry Santa Fe a few months before.  My spring azaleas and rhododendrons would now bloom for someone else.  

I knew the house would be mostly empty and that I would find dead insects sprawled on the kitchen floor.  I wondered if the cats I’d left behind with neighbors would remember me and if the privets would be overgrown.  I hadn’t been there for three months and I couldn’t wait for my feet to get back on the moist red earth. 

I had returned to sell my house of twenty years and say good-bye to it.  I had left some furniture in my basement – a pullout sofa, a bureau and a desk – enough to accommodate me for one more rainy night in Georgia.  Before going home, I stopped for a meal at a restaurant in Old Norcross.  My waiter wanted to know why he hadn’t seen me in a while and I explained over strawberry cheesecake that I had moved away.  He told me he was sure happy to see me again and I nearly cried.

I paid up and went to Target to pick up a couple of throw-away towels and a bar of soap. I thought that one more soak in the old vinyl tub in the guest bathroom might be nice, with the rain sounding like pebbles thrown against the window.  Maybe a cat would come in and keep me company.

The realtors had left the house lit up like a Christmas tree.  I walked through every room sighing and stroking the walls.  I visualized the rooms exactly as they were before they were denuded of furniture.  In a few days, someone else would own my house and they would grimace at my white walls and their minds would turn to colors.  For me, white was a calming backdrop and I never tired of it. 

The cats found me and I let them in so they could wander around and feel the house’s emptiness.  I needed them to know and accept that I was truly gone and that there would be no more treats for them at my door.  They rubbed me with love and swatted me with anger.  I had left them behind to continue to live in the woods where they were at home, not within my adobe walls in the cat-killing desert.  They understood and when I opened the door, they disappeared into the night.

I turned on a backyard light and saw that someone had taken my deck chairs.  I had informed friends and neighbors that my outdoor furnishings were up for grabs.  If someone needed something, they should just come and help themselves.  I had purchased the chairs when I bought the house.  Their PVC arms were stained green with moss and their pink and white striped cushions had gone gray. I had left them behind because they were old and wouldn’t fit in with my new digs. 

I took my bath and headed to the basement to open the sofa, put on the sheets I had left behind and try to sleep.  I planned to get up early and take a drive to points unknown.  I spent the night sleepless, staring into the dark. The basement had no windows and I didn’t know when morning had come.  I finally got out of bed and turned on the overhead light.  I looked at my watch and saw that it was four a.m.  I accepted that sleep wouldn’t come and decided to get up and go. 

I threw on my overalls and headed to the nearest Waffle House.  I had little appetite but ordered my usual – cheese eggs with grits and raisin toast.  I spoke with the cheery waitress who told me she was born in Albuquerque but hadn’t been back since.  I left half my meal on my plate and headed into the still dark, still rainy morning.  I didn’t know where I was headed.  I hoped my rented Chevy wouldn’t break down on some lonely road.

I headed east on two eighty-five and east again on twenty.  Dawn began to lighten the sky, but just slightly.  I saw an exit for a town called Siloam and took it for Shalom, a beacon leading me to a peaceful place, perhaps.  I fidgeted with the radio dial and found a familiar soft rock station.  I drove out of civilization, beyond pecan groves and broken houses and fields clear-cut of their pine trees.  I drove for two hours until the radio became staticky and my cell phone lost its signal.  Where was I?

Fear led me to a big old house with a yard strewn with junk.  I don’t know where I got the nerve to go to the front door at seven in the morning, but I felt hopelessly lost.  Nobody came when I knocked and I ran back to my car and locked the door.  A little further down the road, I came to a small waterworks.  There were signs posted all over it warning of the dangers it housed – mostly having to do with high voltage and certain death.

There was a red pick-up in front of the whitewashed wooden building.  I ignored the signs and went up to the door and rang the doorbell.  A guy in a ball cap poked his head out a second-story window and asked if he could help me.  I asked, “Where am I?”  “Ma’am,” he said, “you are in the town of Mayfield.”  I asked, “Is there any place to stay in the town of Mayfield?”  He replied, “Just so happens my sister has a place near here on the Ogeechee that she rents to hunters and loggers, but I don’t think anybody’s there this weekend.  Let me call her for you.”  The head withdrew. 

I stood and waited on the cement landing, wondering what I was doing looking for a place to stay in Mayfield.  I did like the sound of Ogeechee – so rustic.  The man’s head poked back out and he said, “My sister’s trailer is about a mile from here, on your right behind an unlatched gate.  Just let yourself in.  Take whatever you want from the refrigerator and leave a twenty on the table when you leave.”  I thanked him and got back in my car, a little afraid that I would open the wrong gate and get my ass shot off.  I got over it and found the place. 

The single wide was neat with faux wood paneling.  I parked my car and stepped onto what I figured was a front porch.  The front door was unlocked and the room I walked into had heads hanging from every wall - several formerly handsome bucks, a hideous wild boar, a turkey, a fox and a pile of big-mouthed fish eternally flipping their tails.

I walked out the back door to another porch.  The vision that greeted me stopped me cold, for just beyond the porch were my deck chairs, arranged in a circle around a recently used campfire.  Was I dreaming?    Was I hallucinating?  Had sleep deprivation taken a toll or had I gone mad from homesickness?  How had my chairs made it to Mayfield, more than a hundred miles away from my house in Duluth?

I could tell by the familiar pattern of their lines and creases that they were my chairs.  Then, I saw the orange tabby cat fur adhering to their grain and that sealed the deal.

I sat down and closed my eyes, wondering if the chair would communicate how it had lured me to this place in the country.  With all the roads I could’ve taken out of Duluth and all the hundreds of miles I could’ve gone in any direction, why did I choose the very road that would lead me to this place, the very distance that would lead me to the man who would guide me to this place?   How could the call of the chairs have been so precise? 

For twenty years, the chairs had stood on my deck in the shade of pines and poplars.  No hunter had ever occupied their vinyl seats.   Now, I felt oddly at home in this foreign sanctuary within sight of a river called the Ogeechee.

I sat there a long time, feeling the chair’s embrace and my own presence in the empty chairs around me.  Maybe the chairs had invited me there to tell me they had adapted to a new life and that I would do the same.  And, maybe a piece of me would linger in this green place beside the muddy water after I was gone.   With that in mind, I was finally able to sleep.