Empty Nesters - Remember When

Today our youngest turned 25 years old.  I can't believe.  Where did the time go?  Not only that, but he bought a home.  It's about 35 miles away from us, but it is close to his work.  He was living in Welsh with his brother, Russ, but now he's on his own.  We helped move him in.  His Momma has been helping him clean and get everything in order.  We are proud of him and all of our kids.  Here he is standing by his front door:

I am positive that many of you who are reading this have experienced the same bittersweet feelings I'm trying to express.  Since welcoming them into the world, you try to do your dead level best to introduce them to Jesus, parent them properly, instill values and teach them skills so that they can make it on their own in a dog eat dog world.  You think you have all the time in the world.  But you don't!

And then the day comes when they pack up and leave.  And the house becomes big and quiet.  You are left painfully aware of the mistakes you made in parenting and wishing that you might have done things differently or better.  We are frail and faulty, right?  You've shot your quiver of arrows out into the world.  You pray for your kids who are forging their own way in a cruel world.

You are left with silence and memories of their childhood.  Time marches on.  It waits for no one.  It's a stark reminder that I should be a better steward of it.  Looking back I remember Benjamin as a young boy out in the side yard with his rifle and Confederate Kepi hat reenacting Pickett's charge.  He'd get shot by a sharpshooter and lay writhing on the ground.  We watched from a distance as he imagined various combat situations.  He and Russ fought many battles against the enemy and each other with Air-soft guns.  In fact, look what I found years later in the side yard:

Look right in the center of the photo

Can you see the bright orange air soft pellet?  I think decades from now someone will find one of these and wonder what it is.  Years ago in digging up the bed in our garden in the side yard to plant Irish potatoes, I unearthed an old blue porcelain marble.  Years and years ago, in the same place where Benjamin and Russ battled it out, another young man played marbles, enjoying times of imagination and fun, with parents looking on at the innocence and vivid imagination you have in childhood.

In that same general location, eighteen years prior I constructed a simple swing for Laura Lee and hung it in a live oak tree.  She'd swing and I'd push her.  Good times!  She (and Russ) have homes of their own now, and the swing sits dormant, swaying only when a swift breeze pushes it.

Alan Jackson sings a song called "Remember When," and it gets me in the 'feels' whenever I hear it.  

Verse 4 says:

Remember when
The sound of little feet
Was the music we danced to week to week
Brought back the love, we found trust
Vowed we'd never give it up
Remember when

Verse 6 says:

Remember when

We said when we turned gray

When the children grow up and move away

We won't be sad, we'll be glad

For all the life we've had

And we'll remember when

I think Alan Jackson puts it in the right perspective.  Although it's sad, we'll be glad, for we shared a lot of love and life.  We often talk on this blog about raising animals and plants and honeybees, but the most important, by far, crop we raise is children.