Far Enough Out
The night before, everyone stays at Senn. The rooms stand along the way out with their windows to it, and the tables are long, because nobody sits at one alone that night. I did not sit alone. There were more of us at the table than I had expected, and some I had not seen since I was small.
At home nobody is only yours. Whoever can look after the young ones does, and you grow up in and out of a great many houses, and when you go, the ones who looked after you walk you out. That is how you find out who they were. I had not counted them before. I counted them that night, at the table, and then I stopped, because it is not a thing you count.
In the morning the way runs west to the Shelf. It is the most walked ground there is. Everyone walks it once, and the ones who go with someone walk it twice in a day, out and back, so it is worn wider than any other way I know. Nobody built it. Nobody would.
The Shelf is flat and grey and there is nothing on it but the marker. You see it from a long way off and walk toward it, and it does not seem to come any nearer, and then it does.
At the marker they stop. The ground is worn bare in a ring there, from all the stopping. Nobody says anything at the marker. I had been told that and did not believe it, and it is true. They stood in the ring and I went on by myself. I did not look back, because you do not, and because I knew they would stand there a while yet and I did not want to see them turn.
Here there is a school on my way to the station. In the mornings the small ones are walked to the gate. Some come with one person and some with three, and some with somebody different every day of the week, and nobody at the gate seems to find that strange. At the gate the grown ones stop. The small ones go in.
One morning I stood across the street and watched until the bell. Twelve minutes. Most of them waited after the small ones had gone in. Not long. Long enough to be sure. Then they turned and walked back the way they had come.
I would have liked to tell them it is the right place to stop. I did not. I think they knew.