Abigail M. Schilling

I see you crawl through my archives. Slowly, to be sure, never staying long for anything, but still watching me. You show up as "Winnetka, California" now on the tracker. It's always changing, where you're from. A little ironic, or maybe coincidental, the way it's always changing, or you're always changing, or rather, really, that you never do actually change.

You probably don't remember but Winnetka was the town I grew up in. In Illinois, before I met you, in California. And when I moved to California, and when I met you, I discovered there was a Winnetka here also.

My memory, always stronger than yours, crawled to find that fact about Winnetka that linked it to Illinois. I knew there was something unusual about Winnetka being here and that somehow it was the same. (The same and never changing also, like you.)

Slowly, I remembered in 1991, before I met you, I had learned a lot about Winnetka, Illinois in my well-rounded public education and I had learned that the name meant beautiful land in the native tongue. Finding beautiful land here I was surprised. It had to be the same land, always beautiful, never changing.

Wikipedia tells me that Winnetka, California was named by Charles Weeks whose poultry shop was named after his first chicken shop in Winnetka, Illinois. He started the new Winnetka as a sort of utopia, selling his land to people who would farm chickens and make morally good decisions. It almost worked too, it sounds like, and remains a very nice place to live.

Winnetka, Illinois was a very nice place to live, I don't know if you remember me ever telling you that. And we lived there, very nicely, for four years before we lost all the money and before I met you.

We always talked about that time, before I met you, when your family almost moved to Illinois. And what if we had met in Illinois, in Winnetka, before 2002 when I met you. I don't know why we loved that what if so much but I so often find myself, slowly, crawling back to it, and crawling back to every other what if.