Most of the time, their presence is nothing more than ambience, a whisper in the oaks as you pass by, but I had been gone for three years, and much had happened to me. My life is different, my friends different, my appearance different.

On one of my days there, my mother needed to return chairs to the Methodist church I attended as a child. I agreed to go with her, to help her lug the chairs back down to the basement, and as we finished up, she offered me the opportunity to take a few moments' walk past the oaks down to the slope of the hill where several of my family members are interred.

I thought of my grandfather, and remembered with a sudden sharp sadness that if my nephew is nearly ten, then my grandfather has been gone for ten years now. Keith, gone for close to twenty; my father, gone for four.

I stood there for a moment. The wind whispered a song I knew well. I'd played in that cemetery as a child, had learned and loved the names and starkly simple markers that most of my distant relatives had chosen for their loved ones. It was as familiar of territory as I'll ever find on my travels in this world. I stood there for a moment, and remembered what I said last time: three times, once for each of them, just in case the dead only hear the words we whisper directly to them:

I've been gone a long time. In many ways I've grown up into someone you wouldn't recognize, and you probably wouldn't entirely approve of. I cared a lot about what you thought of me, but in the end, I've had to make my own choices. I wouldn't be the person I am now if I'd stayed here, but you shaped my life and I remember you, and I hope that is enough.

I raised my camera to my right eye and took a photo, then turned to my mother and said, "Maybe later," knowing full well that I would not go, because there was nothing new to say.

For the dead, there is nothing but time. For me, the oaks will whisper for the rest of my days; my memories are there, but my loves and my loyalties are here.

Until there's something new to say, I'll leave them be.

I'm not sure.

A friend said to me a few months ago that returning home to visit a small town can often make you feel that everything there was preserved in amber, and that while you have changed, nothing else has. By the end of this week I'll have my answer, but I think I know it now. Some names have changed, but I think it will be many years yet before Tull changes away from what it has always been.

I did, after all, grow up on a one-lane pea-gravel-and-asphalt road named for my great-grandfather.

I could write about the smaller questions simmering in my mind, but they all boil down to something deeper: which is true, the self I was, or the self I've become? I can pose it in surface questions, like: "Will my accent stay the Alabama/Georgia hybrid it has become, or drift back to the Arkansas twang of my childhood?" In a town of almost completely interrelated people, have I done the impossible and really left, or have I just gone away for a while?

I've been out here for nearly eight years now and I still don't have an answer to that question. At night I'll catch myself thinking that this, this … Huntsville … was the dream world, and that tomorrow's waking will show me to be home, really home, and that you all were nothing more than a feverish intense dream of what I really wanted.

I gave up the kind of roots most people spend a lifetime trying to achieve because while they were mine by birthright, they were wrong for the person I was becoming.

I leave Friday morning.

A week ago today was the fourth anniversary of my father's death. That morning, I asked myself the kind of question that defines the difference between adulthood and childhood: "If I had no more chances after today, what would be my greatest regret?"

For me, the answer was clear. Something about the day, the anniversary—something indefinable and pressing—meant that I spent that morning finally doing something about it. Actions that may or may not get written about here. It's too personal, and has ramifications on lives not my own. Even if I could write it, I am not sure that I should.

Today, after a crossword-and-cat-induced nap, we dressed and headed out for Indian food, at a restaurant in which we are regulars ("No bread tonight?") and came home to a message on the answering machine.

"That's unusual," I said, turning on lights as Jeff headed to the bedroom to check the message. I followed him into the room shortly thereafter, and he gave me the summary. I played it back to confirm, then called my mother: my grandmother, who has been in poor health lately, fell and broke her hip yesterday. She had surgery this morning and is recovering as well as can be expected.

As soon as her condition stabilizes a bit, my mother and I will settle on a range of dates this month for me to visit.

While we were speaking on the cell, the house line rang. Caller ID said that it was Jeff's parents, so I cupped my hand over the phone and bellowed, "Pick up, Jeff!" On the cell line, I could hear my mother's laughter. Apparently I have the old-married-woman bellow down pat these days.

She and I spoke for a few more minutes, and then a friend taught me something new: how to work a sudoku puzzle. As I was completing the numbers, Jeff came in to give me the news his mother had called to give us: John Hancock died yesterday.

John was a childhood friend of Jeff's, and one that I had never managed to really get to know. He served as an usher in our wedding; those of our friends who stayed over the night after the wedding will remember him as the guy who ended up sleepwalking and chugging some sort of chemical—Kara, was it drain cleaner? I don't remember.

He dropped off the radar shortly after that. He was someone whose name always came up when Jeff went home, but someone whom we never managed to catch up with or get to talk to. We would hear about him from family members, but I don't believe Jeff or I managed to actually see him at any point past our wedding, nearly eight years ago.

This was the Horde of Geeks, circa 1998:

• Jeff and I are the ones in the wedding clothes in the middle.
• On the left, in the purple shirt - Brad, who has since married.
• On the front row, Lori (Jeff's sister), who has since married.
• Kicking the cane is Eleanor, who remains resolutely single and, last we heard, is rampaging about in northwest Arkansas.
• Kara is to the left of me, in the white dress. She is married and has two boys now.
• Stephanie is to the left of me, also hiding under my train, and is wearing a green dress. She and Dan (in the back right, trying to be seen over John Wilson) married last year after having been together for ages.
• John Wilson, in the plaid shirt, has also married. He just announced this month that his wife Peggy is pregnant with their first child.

John can be seen between Jeff and me. If you're from Arkansas, he's wearing a Razorback snout. Anyone else would say he's wearing a pig nose.

Death erases chance and opportunity; no more opportunities to make up that missed phone call or to go back and ask that question you always meant to ask. There are no more photos, no more second chances, and time marches on in a silent and endless benediction to us all.

He was twenty-nine. (Last night, we were told that he was thirty. Not the case.)