Sep
27
Back in the family rafting/Rogue river days, we would always stop at the Galice Resort for vanilla soft serve cones and drinks on their giant deck overlooking the water. It was an iconic part of the visit, a deeply enjoyable and familiar place. And then in 2021, it burned damn near to the ground, some sort of electrical fire that left nothing but a boat shed and a gravel parking lot.
Even when you know bone-deep that the world does not stay the same, sometimes a thing can catch you completely off guard. Like what do you mean this place we went to over and over and assumed we’d always be able to go to just, like, burned the fuck down?
They built part of it back, eventually. It’s not the same, but you can still go get a drink, listen to some live music sometimes. And of course our little family is not the same. I doubt there will be a time when the four of us are there again.
Is it harder to lose something important when you don’t see it coming, or when the ending is planned? I would say the former is worse, it can be shocking and there’s no way to prepare. On the other hand, you can be ready for a thing and then it’s nothing like you imagined.
Well. Yesterday I said my goodbyes to Little Joe. I can’t say I took him for granted, exactly, but even with his age in mind I suppose I just pictured riding him forever somehow. I could and could not believe that I was cleaning his stall for the very last time, taking him out for one final graze.
Everything is temporary, the moments we want to wish away and those that we want to cling to with pry-them-from-me-when-I’m-dead fingers. I feel like that is the greatest lesson of aging, how important it is to experience the things we enjoy as best we can before they too are gone.
Sep
23
My youngest child has left for college! Somehow I now have two adult children, both living on their own.
This milestone felt pretty different than it did with Riley. It is no less momentous, I am no less proud or bittersweet about it all, but of course everything else has changed. I did not move him into his dorm with my longtime husband, driving home together and talking about what it all meant. I didn’t say any kind of official goodbye to him, there was not a great sense of Before He Left and Afterwards.
He left the nest, but I myself was not sharing that nest. The torn-asunder feelings largely happened for me last year, not that they have truly ever abated entirely. While it’s not the way I imagined seeing him off to college, I’ve learned that things can stray pretty damn far from the path I had in mind and still be okay. We visited Corvallis together a couple times right before he moved, checking out his various halls and his dorm building, and that was really nice. Maybe even nicer in some ways than the hectic business of move-in day, I don’t know.
And he’s not too far away. Corvallis is about a 45 min drive and quite a lovely journey if you take the country route rather than I-5. I grew up there, my grandparents and mom lived there, it’s a town I’ll always enjoy visiting.
Meanwhile, my other kid is here in town. He’s a private guy so I won’t gush with updates, but he’s doing so great. They both seem to be.
What more could I ask for, you know? Sometimes I still get mired in all my woulda-coulda-shouldas, this past year should have looked like this instead of that, everything would have been better if only, but man, there’s no point in it. It’s all in the no-takebacks rearview and the kids, excuse me young men, are doing so well, so let. It. Go.
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