nest

I did some math and it turns out I’ve been alive for 21,411 days as of this writing. I only did that so I could come up with some ballpark number of car trips I’ve taken, and that’s hard to really nail down. There were many days I took none, and many I took a bunch. I guess the best I can do without exaggerating is to say I’ve taken tens of thousands of car trips.

There are two that are qualitatively different from all the others.

I was warned about the first trip, which would have been in May of 2004, the day we drove two-day-old Danny home from the hospital. The idea that you have a whole other person with you now, a person for whom you’ll be responsible for a couple of decades, sits on your shoulders and chest like a hundred-pound rucksack. Everything is different now. There was a similar day when we took Leah home a couple of years later, but going from one to two is nowhere near the earth mover that going from zero to one is. That one didn’t hit so hard.

The trip I wasn’t warned about, though, was the drive home from Madison last Wednesday after dropping Leah off for her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. Nobody had warned me about the emotional load of going back down to zero. It was only a little bit sad; obviously I’ll miss having my bee and her incredible energy around the house, but she’s only a couple of hours away. We can FaceTime, we can get up there in a hurry if needed. But still, like those trips ~20 years ago, I couldn’t escape the feeling again that everything is different now as we sped southeast on I-90 in a rented minivan.

“Empty nest” is a descriptive term, if not an especially accurate one. I mean, we’re still here, and now we have the manic presence of this demonic puppy in the “nest.” It doesn’t really feel all that empty yet. Maybe that will change as the weeks go by and the dog (hopefully) chills out. Of course the metaphor breaks down further since our fledglings will all be back, and back for possibly lengthy periods of time, at that. As we’ve seen from that webcam in Big Bear, in a real nest, the babies just…leave.

For as long as we’ve lived here, and especially around the two occasions per year when I write the property tax check to the county, I’d told people we’d have a “For Sale” sign in the yard even before Pomp and Circumstance had finished echoing at Leah’s high school commencement. That obviously didn’t happen, and it won’t anytime soon. We’ll stick around a few more years at least, largely since the little birds (that’s my last whack at the metaphor, I promise) will need a place to come back to for some time to come. It’s the only home either of them really know. Danny vaguely remembers our old house, Leah not at all. Plus, we like it here¹, and not for nothing, our current mortgage is four full points below the going rate right now. We even decided to invest in the old pile of bricks a bit more, with a remodel of the master bath/bedroom later this fall. Finally, the last vestiges of the previous owners’ 1970’s mobster aesthetic will be gone. And, of course, moving sucks. So let’s not right now.

As of this summer we’ve been here for fifteen years, which is by far the longest I’ve ever lived in any one place. Looks like it’ll be a few more years before whatever downsizing adventure awaits, and I’m good with it, even though the version of me from about five years ago would be flabbergasted to see this unfold. It’s funny how life happens while you’re making other plans.