Heading south

I awoke to squawking geese singing calls of flight and togethering this morning and I can't help but see the significance in our shared next steps. It's been a minute, over a month actually, since I've written. And it's been intentional as I have wanted to be in the thick of my own version of togethering. We've been on the go since I last wrote and we, or most of us, head back home this week.

Our troop starts to disband on Tuesday and my heart dreads the inevitable separation. The fact that I have a child who is heading to California for college delights, dismays and depresses me. I wish there was some slow-release pill I could take that would get me through the week with a bouyant heart and help me celebrate my mothering and Hugh's bright perseverance, while at the same time help me stay present and release the heavy dread of saying "good-bye" to my oldest at the Martha's Vineyard Airport. Hugh and Dave will head off to LA at 10am on Tuesday for the commencement of USC and freshman year. I will head home with Elsa and Harry to St. Thomas later in the afternoon, with a stop over at the TWA Hotel for a night since it's nearly impossible to get from MV to the USVI in a day.

I keep telling myself we've done this scattering before- so, why does this one feel so different? Is it because Hugh will be on the other side of the country where everything is new and nothing is familiar? Is it because our flock is closer to leaving the coop than re-congregating? Is it the pesky doubt that our move to an island has stirred a visceral restlessness in our offspring, steering them to inhabit different parts of the country to realize their education? Is it the fact that this impending vacancy, while it's universal to all at one point or another, is still a sort of amputation that forces you to re-learn the basic functions of living while there is huge hole in what was once there? I know, I know. It's all of the above.

Our party of five traced a small section of the globe this summer visiting new places, trying different foods, speaking foreign languages, climbing new heights, and we returned to Granny Sue's house on Martha's Vineyard for two weeks to recalibrate and settle into something that has been our constant- a forever nest in our moving and shaking existence. The morning's birdsong and the cricket hum, the pale yellow light through the trees, the sounds of Music Street, the humble bunnies and the wild turkeys, the simultaneous hot water and cold air of the outdoor shower, the joy of doing laundry on the laundry lines, the spread of stars each night, the gathering of wildflowers from our walks to Ally's, the screen porch with the outdated furniture- all of these fragments hold us in a quiet remembering to past summers, time's passage, and is what I can rely on to ground myself, and I'm pretty sure my entire family, before the tide changes. A guaranteed homing away from home.

The time spent on Looks Pond Way this summer has been sacred in its quiet holding of our family unit and the forthcoming dispersal of all of our moving parts. With another year of change and three children in three different schools in three different parts of the country (and thank goodness one of those children will still be with us in St. Thomas)- I prepare for the always blur of back-to-school. As I sit in the dappled sunlight behind the gray shingled house listening to the waking sounds of my family, I remember that love is in the details. If I have sat long enough to take in the sounds, scents and sights of a moment in time, I have created a memory that can bring me home when I feel spread thin, stuck in a looming shadow of missing or longing. In the practice of teasing through the actions and emotions that surround me, I am able to collect and retain the nectar of what lulls my sensitive heart.

It is good to know that the reel of images created from this summer will help lift the inevitable family-sickness (the parent version of homesickness) that is soon to show up. And I've also got a back pocket filled with magical glimmers of three to-date-teenage lifetimes that I can rehash with Dave at any time to lift spirits. And while it's not lost on me that my revelations as St. Sunshine, a reporter on the abundance of amazing, can sometimes focus on the heavier heart-loads of adulting, the practice of sifting through the many ingredients in my life help me formulate more embodied memories. I get to take a sharp piece of reality, bring it to the light, regard the many facets and then work to dissolve the lonely edges so that I don't feel so alone and can keep on going. I thank you for being there as my witness, a friend to these up's and down's that make up this beautiful, brutiful and abundant journey.

With love and tenderness,

St. Sunshine