goodbyes

You only leave home once. At least, that's how it's remembered. Subsequent leavings don't pack the emotional punch of the first one. Maybe they're anticlimatic; maybe life goes on and you're not hit again with the scathing sense of time passing and of memory: how did this lad grow up so soon? How did it come to this?

So, here at the Gee home we're preparing for the parting of a second son, Jeremy. And we're all going about it like real grownups, I must say. But I must also say, I don't like these first partings. There is something irreparable about them. We three left at home will reorder our lives, you know. The wagons, whether we like it or not, will tend to become encircled. The one leaving will be marked and changed by the world. There will be something of the stranger about him when he returns. Yes, he'll be welcomed and loved and fussed over. But rather than a continuing narrative of his life as we have had all his life, while he's gone we'll have only snapshots, emails, those long disjointed phone conversations.

Of course, we also have designs on his room. So there's that, I guess!