A friend (and neighbor) has been spending the semester--she's an art teacher--in Italy. Her daughter, who lives far from her (not only from Italy but on the opposite coast in the U.S.), flew to Italy with her husband and year-old-daughter to spend six weeks of family togetherness. The fact that it was in Tuscany added to the aura of the visit.
There have been ups and downs but mostly it has been a wonderful time, my friend's emails tell me. A recent one ties together two themes about such visits and about our relationships with our grown children and their children. The first is that it's a rare treat to be able to spend uninterrupted time with our grown children. The second is a corollary of the first: our kids and their families are only on loan to us--they have their own lives once they leave the nest.
Her email starts out by referring to my last email on our bird feeding battles with squirrels and the joy of bird watching from the breakfast window.
"Yes, bird feeders and watching the little guys flutter about and eat are wonderful.We had a pair of house wrens settle into a wren house we hung up, two years running, and they had babies, fed them, each day giving them bigger and bigger bugs to eat, took away the little white packages of poop with each feeding, it was amazing to watch. Then one day we saw the babies lean out through the opening and........ fly away! real life. sigh."
That graf foreshadows the heart of her email about the visit with her daughter and 21-month-old granddaughter.
"We are very wisely not under the same roof as [our daughter and family]. We found them a place a twenty minute walk away, which is perfect. We spend lots of time with them, but each have our own places. Quite wonderful. What a great treat it has been to watch [our granddaughter] changing in front of our eyes. She's gone from crawling to walking, from mooing and baaaing and neighing and tweettweeting to knowing tons of words including lalo and anch (yellow and orange) and lalil (olive oil, an essential utterance in Tuscany), very miraculous. What minds us humans were made up with. They've been here a month and will be with us till we leave. BUT what a shock it will be not to see [our granddaughter] every day."
The shock, the sadness and real life, sigh.
