Permanent Waves*

When I was very young I always went out on the porch to wave to my dad and brothers when they went off to work and school, and later on my parents did the same to me. Now it's a habit, and it's happily one our kids have adopted as well (various repairmen over the years have probably thought it was kind of weird how the kids all pile outside to wave as they drive away)! It's not a rule or anything. Occasionally I'll drive off and feel a little forlorn because there's no one on the porch waving me off. But there is generally, in various configurations and various states of dress (or undress), at least one person, and often several, yelling bye! and blowing kisses. It's the best. 

Anyway, for twelve years now (or I guess not quite that long, since I didn't have a camera on my phone for several of those years) I have been periodically snapping a picture of the kids when they come outside to wave their goodbyes. I had some vague idea of gathering the pictures into a little book someday. Now that we're moving and I'm in this heightened state of sentimentality all the time, I can hardly look through them without feeling like bursting into tears! It's almost like you can see the whole breadth of family life in these images: sad children who followed me outside to cry at me. Pajama-clad orangutans. Toilet trainees in underpants. Costumed children nowhere near Halloween. Dancing children and children who should be in bed. "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" :)

I know it's a small thing. But our new house has a garage that opens on the back of the house, so there will be no more waving goodbye from the front porch. It's the end of that little era that I didn't even know WAS an era! It makes me feel very unmoored.

Where did these two little blond fluffy-heads go? I want them back!

Well, it's no good me getting started on that train of thought again…suffice it to say, in retrospect, that all the stress and exasperation and urgency and overwhelm—all the things I was probably feeling as I went off to wherever it was I was going to, all these times—have melted away and been forgotten. But the memories of my little family, loving me and missing me and trusting that I'd always come back—feel more precious than anything I could have left home to find.

(Here's one from the other side. I could have taken far more pictures from this perspective than I did from the "leaving" perspective!)

*credit to Rush, of course