winding down

One daughter leaves, one mother stays a tad longer, and the rain falls in a steady, relentless drip.

Distance is a funny thing. There’s distance measured in train or plane hours and there’s the physical count of miles, and each is too large for me to bear. When I travel to Europe, before the door of the Airbus closes, I am resigned to the heaviness of all that distance that is about to be multiplied many times over, distance between the place where I will soon sleep and where my daughters will be sleeping.

If daughters lived closer to where I am, perhaps I would not see them much more than now. I like to think that I give them space to create their own adult world. But we would share clouds and brilliant sunny skies and occasional Sunday dinners and I would not have to mentally add hours and time zones each time I spoke to them.

But they are here and I am there and so it must be for now.

And the rain falls, and it is a time to eat those eggs and grits and fried green tomatoes, and be happy that the next set of holidays is so close at hand.