When I moved out in 1982 and drove 2,200 miles from New Jersey to Utah and to Brigham Young University, her first child to leave home, Mom walked the house for weeks feeling an aching emptiness, looked in my room to find me gone, missed my voice and my laugh and my presence at the dinner table and in the church pew and at Sunday afternoon games of raucous Pit. “Where Roger?” two-year-old Steven queried, lacking the experience with space and time and life to understand Mom’s answers about me being “at school.”  I was simply and suddenly gone, and she experienced a mourning like for the dead.  We had no internet, no mobile phones, no unlimited data plans, no email, no texting, no Facetime or Zoom or Messenger or WhatsApp for video calling, no Snapchat or Instagram or Marco Polo.  We had hand-written letters that took a week or two each to cross the country.  And we had exorbitantly expensive long-distance calls on chorded telephones.  That old apron string had been cut clean through.  And I did not give it any thought, had no awareness of her grief, did nothing to fill the hole.  And now at age 60 I am home again, and Mom sees me in the hall and finds me in my room, and hears me practice piano, and waves good-bye from the porch when I drive away, and like a relieved chick she raises her hands and her chin and her expectations for her dinner.  I am learning that apron strings come in myriad colors, patterns, hefts, lengths, and strengths.  And they are never fully cut, but merely injured and stretched and tearing.  Some mend.  Others strangle.  All scar.  On Friday night at 8, after another late dinner, Mom asked if I would please take them for a walk in their wheelchairs, and we loaded up and rode down the ramps and rolled up the street, jogging out into the road around the neighbor’s big blue spruce.  A sprinkler caught us, and Mom reveled in cool wetness with a squeal and her arms stretched to the sky.  I announced at 9, with bedtime at 10, that my day was done and that I needed to wrap things up and move toward bed.  Disappointment showed on her face, exhaustion dragged at mine, and she squeezed out, “Just know that I will miss you!”

(Pictured above: Yours Truly about to drive away from home.)