Cleaning Out Cupboards (and bags and boxes)

   As Beloved Child continues to enjoy her free time before heading off to her summer job, I am looking through the piles of accumulated "stuff" that has landed in the basement and on the porch, detritus from when she has "cleaned her room".    I put "cleaned her room" in quotation marks because when she sorts through her things she cannot bear to actually throw anything out. Instead she puts it in a bag or a box and leaves it somewhere else in the house.  

     Finding one (or more) of these bags or boxes is like opening a time capsule.  There are little girl journals with the first page or two written on.  There are craft projects abandoned before completion.  There are decks of tiny cards, stubs of crayons, costume jewelry and innumerable stocking stuffers from Christmases gone by, all jumbled in with single mittens and abandoned hair ribbons.

    I am pawing through these bags of memories, trying to see what can be mailed to friends' who have littler girls and deciding what is just trash and must, finally, be tossed out.  I found a ball of yarn that she spun on her spinning wheel. Hmmm... can't through that out.  The box she made in middle school shop class...is that also a must keep?  And so it goes, an hour goes by and I have to stop.  I need more garbage bags and a plastic tote box for the things that I cannot yet consign to the dump.

    It is a hot, summer day here.  Beloved Child is at the beach with friends.
                                                       I am wandering through the past.   Peacefully.

Graduated!

Blue sky 90 degree day.

1000 people under a white tent on a green field.

107 students in caps and gowns.

Red roses.  Green covered diplomas.

Beloved Child

Proud Mama.

     And so, it is done.   An exhausting month of Senior project, presentations and preparations for graduation and now it is finished.  Beloved Child says it feels "surreal" that it is over now.  All of the build up and preparation and seemingly, in an instant, it is done.   The speeches have been heard, the awards received and the applause given.  Celebratory meals have been consumed, thank you notes have been written and Grandma is on her way back home.  Beloved Child is so very tired.   It is now time to rest and reflect, at least for a few days.

   It is very odd, after this whole year of preparing for "the end" to have it finally arrive.   I wonder if this is the last time she will live at home for any length of time.   From now on she will choose whether I know about her classes or her grades or even her friends.   I hardly know what to say or write.

   I marvel that I have raised a child to this point in her life.  

 She has wings.  

  Fly safe, Beloved Child.