Somehow--I'm not sure exactly how or where he picked it up--my son, a forty-year old husband and father of two darling little girls, manages very well, so well, in fact, that all around me now here in the basement of our home, I'm hard-pressed to find any trace of the whirlwinds that blew through here during a not-long-enough weekend. The basement is that clean. Not only that, there's nothing--nothing my wife and I have discovered--that's been left behind, nothing we'll have to address to Oklahoma.
Yesterday, Sunday, I was almost completely wiped out by the kind of head cold I haven't had for years--I can't even remember one with a similar fist. That was part of the silence, I'm sure--I spent most of the day on the couch, with a blanket o'er me. But that steep head cold notwithstanding, the real reason for the home front silence on the Sabbath was the sudden absence of two little wildcats, packed up and put away into their respective seats in the van before finally departing on an all-day trip back home to Oklahoma. Their antics sentenced my wife and to heavy silence.
At my age, life offers a Sears catalogue of daily events and occurrences that spell out my age, but if you want to know you're a grandparent, just host a four-year-old and her little sister, a two-year-old sometime for a long weekend. The energy they spend on life is so immense it mocks you silly.
And now, the morning after, the silence is not golden but painful, and I'm honestly depressed by the fact that my son cleaned up as well as he did. It seems to me that there's almost nothing in this house to suggest the glorious bedlam that reigned here for the last three or four days. It's gone--every last bit of it. They left no trace of the joyful mess they created.
I'm a bit less beaten up this morning by that head cold. It'll be a few days until I'm capable of working out in the gym, may be a while before my appetite returns. Even the silence is momentary--I need to reassure myself of that.
It was quite a Thanksgiving, but it's behind us now, even though my thanksgiving isn't. Not at all. That thanks is an all-year-long thing.
Maybe they left something beneath the couch. I'll look. Good night, I hope so.
2 comments:
Being a parent is work, fret, care 24-7 that often burdens your day unknowingly; being a grandparent is overwhelming joyful gratitude, and yet often a 24-7 hole in your heart for the next reunion, with a realization of how blessed you have been 24-7 throughout your entire life, abundantly...often also unknowingly until now.
Until the next time, you listen to the silence, and bask in the warmth the memory.
To borrow a simple proverb: Happy is the man who wants what he has"; perhaps that is not really understood, or accepted, until you are a grandparent.
Amen!
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