May tacos bring them home...
I am making tacos tonight, and not Old El Paso shredded lettuce and diced tomatoes tacos out of a box, but the ones we used to eat on the best nights of our adventure years in Utila, with crisped pork al pastor, four of the most perfect avocados mashed with red onion, mango and cholula, black beans and cilantro and more onions, tomatoes and the last of the pickled jalapeños from the garden, and corn tortillas dipped in the crockpot juices and fried crisp. It’s the dish I always used to make when they warned me that lots of extras would be around at dinnertime, the one that all the kids’ friends say reminds them of our house. I stopped just short of making the tortillas by hand tonight because I did have to work, but to be honest, this meal feels like my most important job of the day. After a luxurious holiday month with all the chicks in the nest, Middleman goes back to Miami tomorrow, and we are all a little sad.
I have nothing novel to say about this premise—Grown and Flown chronicles every aspect of young adult fledglings spreading their wings. I read and nod along to many. I agree we want them to launch, to find the vocation and location and people that make their hearts thrum.
I don’t worry so much for me and J. Of course we miss them when they go, deeply, but we have obligations like careers and home projects, the busy-ness of friends and hobbies and Scrabble and walking the dog and creating long narratives about the cats and chickens.
But it is the blessing and curse of raising kids who genuinely love each other that they experience loss when the forward marching of time breaks up their band.
It is not that the past years haven’t been peppered with moments where they were furious with, worried about, and grieving on behalf of each other. It is also not the first time someone has left. The oldest has WWOOF’ed around the world and lived in Ithaca for three years, the middle in Miami for three months, the baby gone on climbing expeditions and doing college to finish her high school curriculum closer to home. But somehow this Christmas, with one pending graduation and moving to grad school in NYC, another firmly building a life where palm trees are more familiar than Northern pine, the other pondering where her gap year will take her, underscored the reality: we will likely not all live together under the same roof again.
I asked the boys on a twinkly, lounge-y fireside night over Christmas, boys whose gifts under the tree beside us included gadgets for making tacos in the kitchens of their apartments with friends in other states, “Do you guys feel like you still live here?”
Both said no, and then maybe seeing the look on my face, added, “We don’t live here, but of course, this is Home.”
My own brother, only 15 months older than me, left for Duke in 1992. While there, he met his wife and they moved to Colorado and have two children, one old enough to be looking at colleges herself. A large part of me is still waiting for my brother to “come home from college” so we can resume the relationship of our childhood.
To ease the sting, J and I plan adventures for everyone. They all have itineraries over the next three months to visit each other, and there’s a lake house in Skaneateles with our name on it, post graduation, for Memorial Day weekend. And of course, they’ll come Home. Visits and internships and friends and holidays and weddings…
When they do, I’ll make tacos.
