pull up a chair

i poured myself out of bed minutes before three last night, as i seem to do like an old swiss clock. and in the murk of the dark, as i stumbled toward the bathroom, a thought crept forth reminding me this wasn’t any old middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom, this was a night in which the professor was in the house. sleeping under this old roof. back in the room where he grew up.

it’s been 13 years, and a whole lot of law school, and bar exams, and zigzagging across the country. there’ve been trips to the ER that scared the behoozies out of me, and weeks that were hard, and hours that were glorious, but the kid with the dream, the kid who with all his heart was hoping to get back to this middle-of-america, one-of-a-kind american city, that happens to be “home,” is back. for at least a year, an equation my mind is still trying to absorb. any time he’s been here in all these years, it’s only been for a day or two, a week at the most. there was always an end date, a date he’d be leaving, and we’d be back to texting and calling. and missing.

he drove 12 hours to get here. he and a car stuffed to the gills with law tomes and professorial garb. and he’s here now, a truth i witnessed just now with my very own eyes as i tiptoed in the dawn’s thin light past the old room where he’s slumbering. i saw the lump in the bed: proof!

truth is, what prompted him most to want to come home, is that he, like the rest of us, had the behoozies shaken out of him by whatever it is that lurked/lurks in my lungs. we all know the grains of time are gliding from one end of the dial to the other. it’s a subtraction, no matter how you cut it. and so we are hellbent on making addition of it. in the best ways possible. in filling the vessel of time with pure unfiltered joy. pushing our hearts to our sleeves. living a life of heart-thumping gratitude. that’s a word so over-spun it’s lost what it means, but when you get to the heart of it, it’s living a life where the thin veil is lifted, the veil between heaven and earth, and the presence of God, of love, is palpable, is visible in the form of the wonders in which we’re immersed: the soft morning sounds, the laughter of knowing each other by heart, the hand reached across a table and squeezed.

so happens the kid got an invite to teach for a year at a law school not too far away. south bend, indiana, a destination i could reach by lunchtime if i decided at 10 in the morning to head there. he’s moving into an old farmhouse tomorrow, a house out in the country, where apples and peaches hang from the limbs in the orchard out back, and raspberries grow fat on the brambles. it’s a genius invention called a sabbatical home, where one professor hopscotches away, leaving behind a fully-furnished, fully-equipped home (straight down to the pioneer-grade hearth in the hoosier kitchen), and another professor on the visitor’s wheel moves in. keeps the place running, the lights on, till the semester ends.

it’s not lost on me how hard he worked to get here, nor the one or two strokes of pure chance that propelled this along. in these months when i’ve whittled my life to those rare few things that truly matter, being the four of us—mom, dad, and two kids, together, rolled in a ball—is at the tippy top of the list. i’ve imagined the hour when i take my last breath, and what i know is that the last faces i want to see in this life are the three of them, circling round me. i’ll promise to haunt them. and, so help me, i’ll do it. the friendliest ghost there ever was.

for now, though, i’m here and i’m kicking. we all are. and we’re holding on. and i am ever so grateful to the university of notre dame for bringing my beautiful beautiful boy, the professor, back home where we all belong.

radon update, for anyone who wondered: we’re not out of the darn woods yet. in fact, the trail is only more twisted. the little disc i bought on the internet, the one reputed to be so accurate, it’s still flashing bright red, a color that signals far more than caution. it’s readings are high, scary high. but the actual professional radon tester is now on the third round of testing, and each time we’ve passed with enough room to breathe. she’s now as curious as i am as to why the disparity in readings, and we’re about to be stuck in the balance of deciding what to do. it’s no small feat to remediate for radon, though i don’t think it entails knocking out the basement out from under us. my date with the pulmonologist has been moved up from november to next month, and maybe they’ll know from looking into my lungs if there’s any sign of radon’s wreaked havoc. once again: uncertainty, the state of existence i dwell in.

that’s the news from here at the house that might be glowing.

love, babs

do you have a prodigal story?