Their first graduation

Amber inclines her computer so It can approve a letter she is sending to a professor at Cornell, discussing her research and aspirations. It reads as so accomplished it could be bluster, but all of it is authentic. Somehow, my spouse has become a professional.

My stomach sinks. If I were a Cornell professor, I would want the author of that letter in my lab yesterday. I might presume they were already there because it wouldn't make sense that someone could have racked up such experience elsewhere.

In my past, these grand life choices were a game of chicken. I remained supportive and hoped to get credit for standing behind them without follow-through. The other option is fighting arguments that might not be necessary because the thing I dread might not happen. It is the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Reading Amber's letter and reviewing their attached resume, I can't imagine anyone would stand in their way.

It feels as though they have gained all this experience under my nose like it was a trick. I am surprised to read they worked on a protein that made fish blind, but I faintly remember grammar-checking a report on the subject. (Amber jokes that the protein forms a spike that jabs the fish's eyes.) There is this sense of "That's why you were taking these courses and getting a 4.0? That's why you worked so hard all these years? So that you could enter a doctoral program at a prestigious university and work to find a cure for Feline Infectious Peritonitis? Of all the lowdown dirty tricks!"

I do not believe I have ever more felt I stood beside so clear a destiny. Stealing me away from the Hudson Valley would be no giant crime because what am I doing here? Could I not do this just as well elsewhere?

I still consider this a sacrifice, but staying here takes Amber from something glorious so she can resent being a vet tech a little more each week. That would be unforgivable. I cannot commit this sin against them.

They inch closer to this new life with every letter they send. They are still a year from graduating with their second bachelor's degree. They will apply to Cornell by December of this year -- applications close December first, though they have yet to learn when they open.

Next summer is also our tenth wedding anniversary, so a momentous season all around.

I want them to get in. I would be shocked if Cornell did not accept them. I can't be comfortable with this, something their relentless enthusiasm does not make easier because then it doesn't feel like we are quite on the same team.

Astronauts talk about the realization, peering down at the Earth, that it is just a planet like countless many. It is the home to every human who has ever lived -- a distinction it may always hold -- but it is otherwise a collection of elements and luck that made us possible, and it is all the more precious for that.

I try to see Red Hook as merely a place, not my home of over a decade. It has been more my home than anywhere I have ever chosen to be. Outside my childhood, there was not a close second. I was never whole enough to make these places home, and I did not have the person in my life with whom it could be.

I have loved Red Hook. It is cozy and familiar. It is closer to Star's Hollow than any place has a right to be, with the mayor hosting dinner mixers in the parking lot and the Apple Blossom/Harvest/Chocolate/etc festivals. In the summer, bands play for free on the corner of Market Street and Route 9 -- though I only go to some of these. There are three Mexican restaurants within a mile's walk of me, one across from a noodle shop. West Market just gained a hip pen and stationery shop near the organic grocery store and the sweets bakery, a few storefronts down from the fried chicken shack.

I would only leave Red Hook if my other option were to leave the person who made it my home. It tried to love me back as best it could.

My mother still sends me real estate listings around here, though I have told her not to. COVID conspired with city people to make housing unaffordable here, as wealthy Manhattanites bought up homes for $100k over asking to make them their one-week-a-year summer homes and then otherwise turn them into another Airbnb. We looked at houses years ago and could not find the right one. Now, it is an impossibility. Amber says the prices in Ithaca are barely better but adds that they would want a house there. I cannot fathom that Ithaca could be our home. I like towns, not cities.

I order away tourist material for our coming anniversary/Amber's birthday trip there, and the best the booklet says is that Ithaca has a lot of holes. If asked what one could do in and around Red Hook, I could give a list with no fewer than twenty entries without pausing (a few of which are "look at a hole"). The tourist bureau of Ithaca -- with money, time, and graphic designers -- can only note that sometimes water falls into the holes, and that's pretty. (It is pretty, but I have waterfalls here.)

Amber does not care if Ithaca is suitable for habitation. It contains Cornell, the only school they wish to attend, so the city may be graded on a steep curve. To me, it has nothing I want, and makes no effort to change this. Even given the opportunity to woo me, the best it could do was name one of the geological features "Lucifer Falls." Otherwise, it may assume Cornell is the only reason people are there, so why waste time and energy being appealing?

I'm never thrilled by change, but all Ithaca offers is that it is not here -- and here is where I like being.

last watched: True Blood
reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell