Home Alone.

My house is on a hill and the front yard slopes down. Years ago when I bought the house the yard held a few plants but mostly it was covered in wood chips.

Gardening on a steep hill feels dangerous. One dizzy spell or a little balance lost and you could crack your head open, legit.

When I’m out front pulling weeds, the neighbor kids often join me. I don’t let them up on the high places but there’s a strip on the ground that dandelions and grass and things I don’t want to grow are forever trying to invade.

We have a thing about getting weeds out with their roots intact.

Today Zoe was chief surgeon and Kallie was her assistant. Zoe asked her sister for tools like she was in the operating room. “Pencil,” she ‘d say, and Kallie would hand her the pencil, for digging. This went on for quite some time. The neighbor kids are the only kids I know that when they offer to help, actually help. There is no tap root too stubborn for these maniacs.

I have to answer Kallie’s constant stream of why questions and accept long distance phone calls on her rock (it doubles as a phone and she refuses to take a message), and there are times when I need to check out and do some meditative gardening, but social gardening with the neighbor kids is mostly a joy.

I am not sure that I ever expected to find myself without children banging around this big old house. In the hustle and bustle I somehow forgot that kids grow up and leave and the noise stops pretty much on a dime the day they walk out the door.

That’s the time in life when you are supposed to get reacquainted with your spouse and find your own self again. You are supposed to maybe travel or contemplate retirement in Tuscany.

Well bad news on that front because I don’t have one of those partner thingies and I’m working enough that hobbies are tough to find time for. I have no money to ever retire and why would I retire when my work is one of the most consistently best parts of my life? I’d be happy with less of it but this house doesn’t pay for itself. Or clean itself, either. I also spend a fair amount of time doing that.

By the time the kids leave you’re ready to show them the door, but it doesn’t mean the whole thing doesn’t throw you into some kind of weepy crisis. Moving through the world without your ducklings is an odd thing to get used to, especially if like me you somehow didn’t see it coming. Every time I’d drive past an old school or some other loaded location I’d tear up and be hit with heavy melancholy.

I remember one particular thought that I had when my kids all left that now seems both sad and laughable. I was mad and sad that I’d never seemed to get the whole thing right before they left. A lot of wonderful things happened in this home, but I’d started and ended relationships, struggled with money, yelled at the top of my lungs and thrown things, and I never did figure out the chore wheel.

In the day-to-day, John Lennon was right, and life happened when I was busy doing other things.

I survived a horrible and crushing break-up and some really difficult times with my kids in this house. All of us went through a lot and then everyone left and I was in my home alone for about ten minutes until a couple of my daughter’s friends needed a place to live.

It was helpful that during the covid quarantine there were other people here. I kept working and despite the lack of activities, I never felt alone.

For a few years it worked great, and then it didn’t anymore.

Birds gotta fly. And me, I need to not be woken up by kids who keep vampire hours and bang around all night. I need to blast music if I want without worrying about who’s asleep at one in the P.M. The arrangement was making us both cranky so Dylan decided to move out.

I did not expect to go through another round of the empty-nester blues but it has hit and I am quietly terrified this time around. As Dylan was leaving yesterday I asked him if he knew where the funnel had disappeared to and I suddenly realized that the minute he walked out the door I would have no one here to open a jar or help me find my keys.

He needs to go. Initially he didn’t mind helping me and I didn’t mind the vampire schedule but in time we both soured so moving out is the right thing. But these last few years I’ve aged some and I’m not quite as capable as I was when he moved in. I feel my age and it’s unsettling.

I’m wobbly, but pressing on ahead.

Zoe has decided that our two houses are really one house and that all my stuff is hers and vice-versa. That means I now have a cat and she has five dogs, a pig and a hot tub. I like this idea.

I left easter baskets for the kids next door and I will hear them wake up and they will get loud and Darby will whine because she loves the neighbors and wants to visit them 24/7. I will turn up my music and get to the business of cleaning this house and tending to the garden. I will prepare the house for my daughter who is visiting next week and I will be okay alone, even if I cry a few rivers and suffer moments of panic adjusting to this new state of things.

I did not expect to feel this way, but here we go round again. I remember the first time I was inside this house. It’s a very old house with two stories and it feels solid. I thought it would be amazing to live in a house with such great bones, but of course I never saw past raising my kids and certainly never thought they’d all be in different states and I’d be single single. Like not even dating single.

It’s time to get moving. I don’t plan to crack my head open any time soon and there’s living to do.

Wobbly old knees and all.