Suddenly....silence

I'm beginning to think perhaps, instead of calling this My Empty Nest, I should have used something more like My Grand Central Station. :-) Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I love having people coming and going!

It's been quite a ride recently. B was here and needed a middle-of-the-night ride to the airport well over 2 hours away. Grammie came for a (delightful) week and needed not only companionship, but also to be taken to a series of medical tests and evaluations (with an excellent local internist).

Then it was time for D to return to college. Sounds straightforward, right? Not this time around. See, over her vacation, D decided to apply to an accelerated program to become an Adult Nurse Practitioner...and it's a thousand miles away! The morning she was supposed to be packing up to return to (her nice, close, two-and-a-half-hours-away) college, reality set in--this could be the beginning of the end of our house still being her home.

D was in one part of the house procrastinating on packing, I was in another part, feeling sad and not getting much done, either. And whenever our paths crossed, we snapped at each other. Finally, the light dawned, and I went to her, led her to a couch and pulled her into my lap...where we cried on each other's shoulders for quite awhile. After that, we both calmed down and were able to get done what needed to be done. Ah, tears are indeed healing!

The morning the OC drove away with Grammie, I barely had time to notice that I was the only person in the house--I was too busy scurrying around changing sheets and starting on the more essential parts of the mountains of our laundry that had accumulated while others needed the washer--before heading off to a committee meeting at the church conference office.

Then there were the many details of another big project that occupied the next two days (more on that in a subsequent entry) and it wasn't until this morning when I have nowhere that I need to go, that suddenly the house seems very, very quiet...and very empty. Even the cat seems to sense it as she's been hanging around nearby all morning. Of course, the snow falling outside that muffles even outdoor sounds may have something to do with that silence. ;-)