Return

Long time, no blog! I've been busy meeting my self-imposed May 15 deadline to finish my Young Adult novel. I made it! It still needs work, but I reached the end, and I hope to have it polished up and on the way to my agent by June 1. One of the reasons I wanted it finished by May 15 is that my youngest son came home from college the evening of May 15 for a much-too-brief two week stay. I wish my oldest could've come with him but he had to stay and work. I won't see him until July. I haven't seen either of them since the first of January! Way too long! Anyway, whenever one or both of my kids are headed home, I think of this poem that my mother-in-law has inside the cover of her cookbook. She put it there when her children started leaving home for college. It never meant much to me until my own kids left home. Now it pretty much captures my mood when I'm anticipating their homecoming. It's really aimed at Christmas, but just change the words "Christmas" to "summer," "November" to "April," and "flakes" to something like "flutters" or "flashes" and it works for this season.

RETURN
by Linda Pastan

Instinctive as swallows
the migratory children
return at Christmas,
strewing the roads
with their brief colors,
moving like the weather
from south to north,
from west to east.
It is November, these flakes at the window
are only leaves.
But, already the ritual
readies itself.
It is the birth we prepare for,
the homing
of children...