Letting Fly

I woke up a few weeks ago from a dream with an image painted clear as day in my mind. An imprint of a bird had formed underneath my periwinkle blue shirt and started moving as it tried to push out against me. I could tell it was a bird from the shape that it made against the thin blue shirt and the tickle of its quickening motion beating against my chest. Wings spread wide and flapping, its flight was imminent.

There’s a gentle chill these early fall mornings on the farm and a golden light that lingers low in the evenings. It loosens memories of first days of school and the fading last days of summers freedom. It’s a slow dance of transition reflected through the winds undressing of the trees. This letting go is a colorful one to behold. Leafy gowns of reds, oranges and yellow are willingly pushed to the ground in breathtaking gusts by wind and rainstorms. I wonder at this process of senescence, of leaves designed to let go and decompose, becoming food for another season’s renewal.

This season our family is perched on the precipice of our own transition. Our two youngest are heading to college and I’m left with the work of letting go, once again. Truly we should be old friends by now with the number of times we’ve met, quarreled, and backed into our corners, but with each return we just go deeper. It started a couple weeks ago when we brought our youngest to school in California. It has not escaped me that she has chosen the complete opposite coast from us as her older brother had before her, in another wave of letting go. Our second will head to a local college after having spent a couple of years exploring the wider world of work, choosing to step back into a classroom again, for the next phase of life. His life-ing path so far has a texture similar to his dads who decided to go back to school after some time learning a trade outside of the classroom and as he so wittingly says, “sometimes the apple rolls down a hill when it drops and sometimes it doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.” They all find their way.

Each of our three children has taken wildly different paths in life, but who hasn’t, right? At times we have had all three in three different schools at the same time. I still have vertigo thinking of that season where I drove in circles, all day, every day for a whole year. We have experienced traditional school, home school, boarding school and no school. One has a high school diploma, one has a HiSet diploma and one graduated with no pomp due to unusual circumstance from a hybrid home-school and online situation. I’m still not sure if I was supposed to make a diploma?

I’ve been wondering to myself what the actual work of this letting go might look like? I know that it is something that I am supposed to do and a process I must go through, but what does that even mean? Outside of mentally checking all the marks down the get-them-off-to-school or out-of-the-basement and gainfully employed checkmark list, where does that leave me?  What am I supposed to be feeling here, cuz I’m all over the place. Then I remember the dream of the bird and the wings ready for flight. I’ve heard many stories about empty nesting and empty nesters but not too many about what happens next? Do the birds left behind really just sit in an empty nest or could they also fly the nest, knowing that the cultivation of home, lives within?

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, once fledglings leave a nest, they do not return and in most cases, neither do the parents. Though some species might return at a later point to raise another brood, that is not the case for most. They move on. And yet, as parents who live out of a societal mythology rooted in becoming “empty nesters” after the kids leave, ours is a sad story sitting with little flight post children. We might find ourselves in the void of fledging children, still tidying the nest and searching for worms, awaiting a return that might never happen, speaking from experience. I’m sure it’s comfortable for some, this tidying up and waiting. But for this free bird, there has to be more.

As I cut back all the dead and spent Sunflower stalks to the ground, I hear the honking sounds of wild Geese, announcing their arrival onto our tiny toadstool laden bog called Beaver Pond. It is always a short layover on their seasonal migration route, but dependable, nonetheless. Working the field at the edge of the pond, my seasons are heralded in and out by the rowdy, sky-bound travelers. I mean, has spring truly begun until a jetlagged, windburned, gaggle of Geese arrives trumpeting the Ms. Julia Warde Howe version of Battle Hymn of the Republic? A graceful cascade of geese that belies their large stature and raucous song, gliding down onto still water, “glory, glory, hallelujah, his truth is marching on.”  We hear it again with their Autumnal departure, a dissonant call similar to fledging children marching into their next phase. Whether it be college, trade school, kindergarten or the local Perkins to serve a hungry late-night crowd, when you hear the sound, you know a migration is underway.

My mind flashes once again to the dream of the bird imprint beating against my periwinkle blue shirt. I wonder if the bird is a Wild Goose, a flashy Red Cardinal or a Pine Warbler, the sweet yellow songbird that lives on the tips of the Evergreens calling forth a mate with its soft, quick, trill? I woke from the dream before I got to see it freed from the confines of my clothing.  A week later I am sitting on a plane traveling from the west coast to the east after leaving our daughter behind in her decked-out, dorm-nest. I gaze out the window and realize with each new stage, I am witnessing my children’s personal flight of migration over and over. I place my hand softly over my heart and fight back a rush of tears that want so badly to flow.  I’d rather wait till I’m home where I can ugly cry my beautiful feelings of seeing my children grow wings. My hand still held over my heart registers the rhythm of a strong beating against my chest, a quickening motion of something wanting escape.  Ahh, yes, I know that songbird. How could I have forgotten. I too am a bird that honors the call of migration and my trill is made through the taste of flight.