After our last child left for college, I struggled. The full life it had taken years, decades, to build had vanished, as evanescent as the mist. They all came home for Thanksgiving, and I—who had spent so much of their childhood despairing that I would never again have a moment to myself—followed them around like a girl spurned but loving still, ashamed.
They are building their own lives now, and when they left home to return to them, I took myself to the woods. Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.