Here and Gone

Well.  They're gone.  Just before 10AM, we tucked Bryce and Reed into the car with fresh, clean shirts that were all hung on plastic hangers with the top buttons buttoned.  A pan of frozen chicken enchiladas was in the trunk wrapped up in a couple of beach towels.  There was a grocery sack labeled "Reed" filled with dorm snacks.  There was a grocery sack labeled "Bryce" loaded with kitchen "staples" and Heaps o' Butter microwave popcorn.  In a disposable cake pan were neat squares of Texas Cake lined up ready to be either slowly savored at Bryce's apartment or quickly devoured at Reed's dorm.  

It feels so good to be able to spoil them when they're home.  To savor their presence in my kitchen.  Here are some things that I particularly enjoyed:

• Seeing them open the oven door deeply breathing in the spicy fragrance of  Mom's Homemade Chicken Enchiladas 
• Carefully washing, drying, folding and hanging their laundry and the laundry bags in which they traveled from Waco
• Telling them about all of the special (and, in most cases, high dollar) treats I bought for them at Market Street (Promised Land Midnight Chocolate Milk which is traditionally served only at holiday and birthday breakfast and Kettle-Cooked Potato Chips with Sea Salt and Cracked Pepper which are generally present on special occasions like the 4th of July and high holy days)
• Seeing Reed swagger around in a Baylor shirt at the CHS-MHS football game on Friday night (the wearing of the college t-shirt at your high school's football game is a time-honored rite of passage)
• Watching our friends welcome them home like long lost friends at that same game  ("You're home!  You get over here and hug my neck!")
• Turning back their beds at bedtime knowing that someday they will fully understand the love that comes with a Mom's turn-down service
• Evening up Reed's sideburns with my little trimmer after the particularly bad hair cut he got on Saturday
• Hearing them talk about classes we never took, professors we never had, and their new friends that we have yet to meet
• Hugging them with all my might and standing on tiptoe to kiss their fuzzy little cheeks

Alan and I felt old as we waved them until they were almost 1/2 a block away.  We turned and faced the nest.  Then, we grinned at each other realizing that the afternoon was ours to squander away as we pleased.  And so, squander we did.