Nest Moves

     I started a book the other day in which a woman wanders through her house staring morosely into the empty bedrooms where her now-grown kids grew up. Since I don’t enjoy importing other people’s misery into my brain, I hot-footed it back to the library to exchange it for a nice murder mystery.

          Those first few pages, though, did make me realize something.  

          When our daughter went off to Northeastern University all those years ago, the first few weeks were a bit rough. I peered into that empty bedroom and visualized the dangers of the streets of Boston. But that phase didn’t last long. We were back and forth to Boston anyway, I was beginning a new career, our son was still at home, and life went on.

          Plus, just about the time we were shedding kids we were also shedding houses. We left the house where our daughter used the squares on the kitchen floor to mark out property lines for her Fisher Price people and where our son hung suspended from the dining room doorway in his bouncy seat stomping zwieback biscuits into a spitty pulp on the wood floor.

          In the next house, our son was only with us for a couple of years before he, too, moved on after college. This second house created its own memories of grandkids in the backyard and extended family filling up every room during the holidays.

          We no longer live in the home where the kids’ heights are charted by the doorway and we no longer point to a spot where someone took her first steps. But we also aren’t rattling around in that drafty four-bedroom Dutch colonial built in 1926, with rooms used only a couple of times a year.

          On Christmas Eve we’ll pack one family of five, and another of four into our condo like we did last year, and it will work – just like it did last year. We’ll be making new memories, while the old ones stay tangible in our minds, as solid as the brick and mortar of homes past.