Turning Leaf

This moment is a bridge between
Past and Future -- carefully cross it.
This moment is choice -- Make it.
This moment is life -- live it.

-- Pum Sandhu

This summer hall pass, all this home alone, has me remembering what it was like when I was a SAHM--minus the thundering roar of children’s voices echoing throughout the house.  (The house is still and silent; only the noise I create vibrates the walls.)  The days when I washed floors on a Tuesday at noon, ran to the stores at ten in the morning and picked up, continuously, after the entire family.  Answering the phone ten times a day to King Ralph’s calls of what are you doing; never believing my answer of “laundry”, still, on the sixth call.  Because contrary to his male belief system; it actually took most the day to crank out the laundry for a family of five…in between loads of laundry and dusting furniture, packing in a few chapters of a great novel. Oh, and blogging.  Aaaahhh; the good ole’ days.

When it isn’t my summer hall pass season I feel it a literal chore to wash floors on a Saturday.  Running to the stores is an after work obligation to feed the family or secure toilet paper and laundry soap.  Laundry is done mostly when King Ralph announces to everyone that he is on his last pair of underwear and will forced soon to wear his cleanest dirtiest pair.  The only phone call King Ralph shares with me each day is the one I make on my way out of work.  Often I am so tired from answering phones and talking to preteens and teens that I make my calls short in opt for silence.  How life has changed.  The changes keep on coming, no matter how much I try to stop them.

This year King Ralph and I will take a summer vacation minus the offspring.  We have been awful lucky that we have daughters that treasure family vacation time—road trips, long camping trips cross country, singing in the car while memorizing the words to all those “best of” albums from the days-gone-by; albums that savor what really good music was all about.  This year it’s different.  Not that the girls don’t want to be with us, they just have chosen different paths for themselves.  M is off in New York (I have a good story coming soon), D has taken a full time job this summer in hopes of stashing enough cash to join a sorority.  The one thing as parents we refuse to pay for…not mention I so don’t think D is the sorority kinda girl, but wants to be “like” her sisters.  This in a sense is endearing.  But college is a time to figure out and learn who you really are, and figure she will.  Princess A was offered to join in on the vacation fun, only to inform us that she is not an only child and at twenty-three does not want to see how it tastes.  Really I think she prefers to save her vacation time for jet-setting to California to visit a particular (remaining unnamed) young man.  A girl with a real job savoring every day of her earned time off.  And so the leaf of life takes a turn.  Question. Are any of us really ready for the leaf to turn?  I say no.  Maybe it’s because, we are all so nostalgic for “what was”…because our children defined who we were for so long it is hard to imagine being “just a couple” again.  As romantic as a couple is there is certain romance to family—a love of time shared like none other.      

    

One day the leaf will turn yet again.