I write you from a place where people sort their trash thoroughly, carrying the plastic bag, which now contains only the most truly horrid, not-at-all-recyclable-or-compostable bits of rubbish two blocks around the way to a shiny tiny mailbox-as-trash-hole place. Once there, I scan a card to unleash the jaws of a cylinder the size of a five-gallon-bucket, and listen as it falls under my feet.

I write you from long spans of daylight. From walks in a forest that was once the summer playground for the monarchs. From a place where people’s most basic needs are mostly met.

I write you from a consistent drip of kindness and a blush of embarrassment.

“Spreken Engls?”

“But of course.”

I write you from a cool breeze after a baking hot day. I write you from a place where most stores are closed on Sunday because it’s “Familietijd” or family time, but where I’ve yet to see a church building with its doors thrown open for the people or a schedule of services outside.

I write you from within an experiment.

I write you from a table I recently assembled. I write you from the spot where I cried strong blinding tears the morning I learned Andrea Gibson — a fellow traveler who turned up the volume of tenderness-as-bravery so loud that I could hear it wherever I moved, defensively, crouched over in my constant attempts to grow through the gnarly burls into a smile, a patience, a hope. They echoed and now I’m here, perched with a satchel full of writing that I want to let lose but I’ve been wary. Unsure. Defensive. They were, and I am. And I know what needs to be done.

I write you from a place with dark bread and sharp cheese. A place with what I call “blackberry” and “elderberry” hanging over the sidewalk. I write you from a neighborhood where people grow passionflower and figs and gladiolas in the tiny bits of dirt and crevices and pots rested on cobblestone front yards.

I write you from a swampish sand dune that some of my ancestors must have trod through more than 300 years ago on their way from here-ish to Lenape land where they joined thousands of their countrypeople in a murderous occupation of a river delta. Maybe they snuck through the Duke’s forest as they made their way to a boat? Whatever the precise footsteps of their origin, I know where their travels end. Across the street from my friends’ house near Hudson. I walked upon them one day while stretching my legs and there, etched into grey stone, a field full of Deckers. What were they leaving? What were they promised?

I write you from a place where the sky is big and blue except when it is gray and the rain pours like buckets and then, just as quickly as it started, it stops. I write you from arriving into the center of loud bird songs that ricochet off the brick walls and red tiles, conversations that start before me and without me and I love.

I write you from a place that is not perfect. No place is. But I can say that when I rode on a train to my first immigration appointment, I had no worries that it was a trick; no worries that I might be abducted and tossed into a jail or shipped off to a country I’d never seen before.

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I write you from within grief

And so I write you with grief at the intensified horror in the only place I have ever called home, a country that is tens — no hundreds — no millions of places woven together by stories and migrations and hopes and endurance; a place made “a place” by contracts and constitutions and treaties and guns and genocide and enslavement and war and the threat of guns and funding of bombs and making of bombs and so, so much guns. Basks of people growing food and hoping. Or not. Bales of people who are very afraid and rise the next day. My friends. Neighbors. Colleagues. People I think of fondly and can’t quite remember their current name.

I have made a choice — a big one, a series of choices really — and I’m still figuring out how long its tail is. The first week, as I wandered around trying to figure out how to get my dog enough water in her bowl or where the trash-garbage-credit-card will make the satisfying “beep” the question that pulsed through me was: What. Have. I. Done.?

I write you from a tender unknowing.

That question has mostly faded. In its place, curiosity about how to do what needs done next — big picture. Long haul. I write you from a steadiness today. I write you from the first part of a story.

Here’s a picture of the center of a national park, of a swampland that I hope to be a good neighbor to.

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If you’re considering leaving the US (even if flashes of “what if” or “I couldn’t!” cross your mind occasionally) my wife Nova and I wrote a book just for you.

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