a particular species of joy: the home-coming

by bam

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welcome-home brisket: in the works

if my heart were on x-ray this morning, or hooked up with dozens of wires, the evidence would be undeniable, spelled out in pictures and long strings of numbers: my heart, you would see, is in rarefied state. its walls must be bulging. it’s possibly glowing. and certainly gurgling along at double its usual rat-a-tat-tat.

sans x-rays and wires, you’ll have to take my word for it. my heart, at the moment, is in leap-out-of-its-chest mode. in a matter of hours, i will leap behind the steering wheel, point the nose of the old red wagon toward the world’s busiest airport, and wait for one tousled head to rise up above the crowd packed onto the escalator: my sweet college freshman is on his way home.

my nest will be empty no more. at least for the next stretch of days.

i’ve done my level best with this mostly unoccupied domicile — heck, i’ve gone out to dinner on school nights, whirled through the opera, taken in the occasional lecture (all those things i’m told grownups can and might do). i’ve gotten used to setting merely two forks, two plates, two napkins. and all but forgotten the art of staying awake till the midnight (or later) click at the door, the one that tells me the rascal is safely and soundly home for the night.

ah, but it’s clear — evidently, emphatically, without-a-doubtedly — my cruising speed comes naturally and in exclamation points when i’m surrounded by, clucking over, tending and loving and laughing out loud with the people i love. most especially the people i birthed.

it might be the subtle shifts in the days ahead that thrill me the most: the footsteps overhead, or the ones galloping down the stairs. that midnight click at the door. the shower that runs for what seems like an hour. the piles and piles of shoes coagulated in the front hall. the milk bottle that drains — seemingly all on its own, by magic, and in the blink of the night. or this: to walk past the room at the bend in the stairs, the one i’ve come to know as empty, untouched — as neat and tidy today as the day after he left — and, for the next string of days, to be able to pause there at the doorway and witness the blankets all lumpy and tousled because there’s someone in there!

oh, sure i love the big bangs: the welcome-home dinner, the catching up on every last story. watching him run to the curb when his grammy comes over. squeezing every last one of his home-coming friends. cooking for eight — or fifteen — one of these nights.

but i think the thing i’ll most savor is the hum and the hiccups that tell me, quite simply, he’s home and in reach. and i can bury my nose in his tousle of curls, even while he’s asleep. maybe especially. when he’s off in dreamland, but under my gaze, and i can drink in the joy and the blessing. i can savor these days and these nights when the sweet boy i love is tucked into this nest, and within close and unending undeniable reach.

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this is the kid coming home from college tonight, back in 2011 when he was the little brother welcoming home the one who’d just come back from college…

once upon a time — eight long years ago now — i wrote a homecoming tale when my firstborn was coming home for the very first time. it ran in the tribune, and i tucked it into the pages of Motherprayer, my no. 2 book. here it is: 

Welcome Home, College Freshman. XOXO

I’ve been imagining the sound for months: his footsteps.

The house has been hollow without them, the thud I came to know as his as he stumbled out of the bed and galloped down the stairs. I can almost feel the gust of the wind as the front door swings open and in pops that curly-haired mop I last buried my nose in on a hot August day when I left him on a leafy college quad a thousand miles away.

But any day now—I could tell you the hours and minutes—we are about to fall into the sweetest of homecomings, the freshman in college coming home for the very first time.

It’s a film loop I’ve played in my mind over and over. Since way back before he was gone. It was, in many ways, a salve to the wound that was growing, deepening as the day of his leaving finally arrived. Nearly swallowed me whole, that widening gash.

I’ve long savored the romance of November, when the light turns molasses, the air crisp, and planes fill the sky, the crisscrossing of hearts headed home. But never before had I felt it so deeply.

This year, one of those jets is carrying home my firstborn.

Now, all these months later, I can only imagine the boy who’s more of a man now. Calls home just once a week, Sundays, after 5 p.m. “Circa 1975,” I call it, just like when I was a freshman in college and had to wait for the rates to go down to report in to the grown-ups back home.

It took me the better part of a month to get used to the missing sounds in our house. To not wince each night when I laid down three forks, not four. To not leave on the porch light as I climbed up to bed.

Over the months, I’ve learned to steer clear of particular shelves in the grocery store, because they hold his favorites—the turkey jerky, the sharp cheddar, stuff I used to grab without thinking, his stuff.

Curiously, I haven’t spent much time in his room. Except once, when I tackled the closet, folded every last T-shirt, rolled up loose socks, rubbing my hand over the cloth, absorbing the altered equation, that I was now the mother of a faraway child.

And so, I’m looking forward to when the place at the kitchen table will be ours again, the place where we talked until the wee hours, poring over the landscape of his life, refining the art of listening, asking just the right questions.

I leapt out of bed days ago, scribbled a list of all the foods I wanted to buy, to tuck on the pantry shelves, to pack in the fridge. I flipped open a cookbook to a much-spattered page, the recipe for one of his favorites. It’s as if the alchemy of the kitchen will fill places that words cannot.

I can barely contain the tingling that comes with knowing that, any day, he’ll be boarding a plane, crossing the sky, putting his hand on the knob on our door.

My beautiful boy, the boy I’ve missed more than I will ever let on, he’s coming home to the house that’s been aching to hear him again.

may all those you welcome in the days ahead fill your heart to spilling. and happy blessed day of thanksgiving…

oh, p.s., you can find the recipe for welcome-home brisket (pictured above) if you click here…