June 6, 2025
That sure went by in a short speedy slide.
It is a beautiful and bittersweet ritual. The graduating seniors return to their elementary school replete in the transitional regalia of adulthood, to remember just how small they once were, and how big these classrooms were. To think of when it was they who watched the seniors came through to be cheered on, unable to imagine what that journey would be like.
We're still a week and a half from graduation, and a couple months from the departure for college, but the sand is certainly passing through the hourglass. The nest is going to be larger by subtraction rather than addition.
I have come to realize that this is the Year of the Way of Things, for this is how it must be, when it all goes reasonably right and we get lucky about all the ways it might not have.
I took that walk one last time, up our dead-end gravel road to the blacktop, and up Memory Lane to the sidewalk arch we walked through nearly every day for those first six school years. To be inside our little village school again for the first time in seven, and recognizing the grade level art on the walls even as the names have changed. And it was lovely to reconnect however briefly with fellow parents, with a quick laugh and reminiscence about field trips, spaghetti dinners, and school plays, and marveling at how grownup they all suddenly got from that time when my mom visited their kindergarten class to read them a book.
It is indeed beautiful, and bittersweet, and I am feeling it all deeply - the proud and the happy, and the wistful and sad too. For this is the way of things, when we are lucky.