These Days. My mother, young and brave, us in Germany. A 3rd story walk up. Tiny apartment. Big enough. Just us and him back then. No bevy of cousins. No passel of loud aunts and uncles. No grandparents to weigh in, offer advice on a child’s fever in the night. She tried to make Grandmama’s Chocolate cake. Me and Daddy laughed at what a wreck it was. She cried. Homesick I’m sure. Missing . . . everything. The familiar sound of voices known. The scent of flowers in the air recognized. The swooshing music of wind in the pines. Everything unknown and strange. Our little house burned flat to the ground. What shifting our lives endured. Her beautiful tea service, gold edged cups, never used but always displayed. Where is that thing now? What became of it? I started school. Kindergarten. We had a ritual. Me walking till the path curved, went on beyond her line of sight. I turned every morning right there at that corner, saw her standing in the window, watching and I waved goodbye there. Turned and went forward on my own. Alone the rest of the way. But there was that, the last wave, a comfort in knowing she had been watching. And in my mind, she stood right there, waited until she could see me coming in the afternoon and open the door. But one day came that I turned and she wasn’t there. I waited. For a long, long time. Confused by her absence. The space of her emptiness more pronounced than her presence. At five I knew this was something profound although I did know the word I knew it by instinct. I knew that feeling in my gut meant something that I would carry with me all my life. The knowledge that empty space could be a hell of a thing. That moment as real to me as it was what feels like a thousand years ago. The next morning, she was back again, right on schedule but that feeling never left me. That image of that dark window, the absence of her. And I knew with every cell of my being it held a truth that would meet me on the road of my life. That I would turned the corner and someday be on that I would have to walk the rest of the way alone. It’s like this with the things, the people, the places we love, take for granted cause we’re human after all. And we wonder, how is it that the emptiness of them fills up so much space?