Boys to Men

I'm not a very honest blogger.
I think I avoid writing about the topics that are hurtful. Instead, I attempt to be funny or divert to book plots.
That's why, right now, I have a blog post languishing that begins:

So, he moved out yesterday and left without kissing me goodbye.

Both of my boys have now moved into apartments, and they were very different departures.

Yes, you can still see his ribs. He never did put
on weight while living in the college dorms.

Spencer came home from college for about a week. He slept most of the days away, caught up with his friends in the evenings, and even found some time to scrape the garage so we can paint it.
He drove back to school on Sunday with his car filled with clothes and an air mattress so that he can camp out in his house until we take his furniture down on Saturday.
He texts me things like, "Can you bring down a spatula?" and "The mac and cheese seems really watery." So I had to tell him he should drain off the water before he added the cheese.

I drove down Thursday with his desk, and we hung curtains and took a trip to the grocery store to stock up on essentials.
Spence is far from perfect, but he's interested in talking about things. So I can tell him about my classes and students or have conversations about Grace and her adventures. And he shares a lot with me too.
He hasn't even complained about the flamingo and palm tree dishes I bought for him at the garage sales last weekend.
Earl and I are going back down today with a truckload of furniture so he'll have his real bed, a couch and a dresser.
The apartment is fine on the inside, but the outside looks like typical student apartments, kind of run down with steps crumbling and the porch overhang a bit rotten. It's the kind of place that parents would never approve of renting, but college students are a bit more eager. I'm sure it'll be fine for one year.
Spence has already texted the maintenance guy about a leak under the sink, a crack in a window and a slow draining bathtub.
He's still waiting to have internet installed. He called before he moved in and set up installation, but that internet company had some equipment challenges. So yesterday he called the other internet company. He's learning about the frustrations of dealing with utilities. I'm sure the experience will be an eye-opener for him.
So there was the peaceful transition of one boy to his first apartment.

Tucker moved out two weeks ago, on May 1.
I was gone to work and when I came home, a beat up pickup truck behind the garage was partially loaded with furniture.
He and his new roommate carried out mattresses and a desk and dresser then bags full of clothes. When we asked if he needed help, he said, "No."
And he left then, without kissing me goodbye.

Even through all the tense times we've had since Tucker returned home from college in December and lived at home throughout the winter and into spring, he has leaned over to let me plant a kiss on his bearded cheek most days, whether in the morning as he left for class or in the afternoon as he left for work, or even when he came home at night from time out with his friends.
19 is hard.
He thinks he's an adult, but he's still making adolescent mistakes.
We had said we wouldn't help pay for an apartment. He could live at home, or he could go to college and live in a dorm.

All three of my kids on Tucker's 19th birthday in March.

This spring, we agreed to let him move into an apartment with a friend in the hope it might help our relationship. We didn't seem to have conversations, but terse snapping one liners at each other.
He hated being home and having to answer questions like, "Did you go to class?"; "How are your grades?"; "What are you doing tonight?"
The questions might even be polite, like "how was your day?" but he bristled each time.
So after he left, I was heart broken that things were so bad between us.

But just two days before he left, I was in bed around 11, with my door closed to keep the cats from annoying me, as they like to do when I try to sleep. Suddenly, the door was pushed open and Tucker said, "Mom, will you come help me?"
I jumped up and went into the bathroom where he was leaning over a trash can throwing up.
He had a splitting pain in his head. He felt sure it was a brain tumor, as many of us do.
"I think it's a migraine," I said.
I got a cold cloth and put it on the back of his neck. I found the Excedrin migraine medicine and he was able to keep that down.
I settled him on the couch and sat next to him until he stopped sweating and seemed able to relax.
Then my husband took my spot and sat up until he fell asleep.

So even as Tucker brusquely moved out of our house, I remembered that just two nights before, he had turned to me when he needed me.
And my goal will be that he knows I'm here for him. That doesn't mean that I will bail him out of every situation or give him money, but I'll always love him, and he can move back home if he wants to.

The day after he moved out, he came back home and ate with us. On Sunday, he texted me and asked what time family dinner was. I hadn't actually been planning a family dinner, but since Grace was leaving for Europe and Spencer was home, it was an excellent idea.
I saw Tucker most days the week after he moved out. When I went to the grocery store, I bought an extra gallon of milk for him.
I offered him a box of Raisin Bran Crunch that hadn't been opened yet.
"No, that's okay. We only have one bowl," he said.
So during the neighborhood garage sales last week, I found Spencer's flamingo dishes and another set of dishes for Tucker's apartment for only $5.
Last week, he and his roommate drove to Colorado to stay for the week and bring a friend home from college.

Crystal Lake at Pike's Peak

We've had some heated exchanges about the amount of data he's using on his phone, but he also sent me some lovely scenic pictures.

Garden of the Gods

Our relationship still has many mountains ahead, up and downs, but I know he loves me, and I'll keep working to treat him like an adult -- an independent adult, and hopefully he'll move toward that title.

Also connecting with Saturday Snapshot today because there are some lovely photos in spite of the very long post.

Wildfires in Corsica

The news for weeks has talked about wildfires in Colorado. People flee their homes with few belongings and wait anxiously to see if the firefighters can stop the walls of flames advancing through the dry mountain brush. Houses are burned. Some people have died.
The news reminds me of a month I spent in Corsica more than 25 years ago. I was there babysitting two American girls with French grandparents and it seems like the time is right to tell the story since I'm participating in Paris in July sponsored byThyme for Tea and Bookbath . I've posted about my trip here when I talked about fashion, and here about lessons I learned from France, and here about a secret crush and an injury in Corsica.
While we were staying in Corsica, wildfires burned.
At first, I didn't know what was happening. I stretched out on my bed in the stone house to take a siesta while the little girls, Claire, 3, and Brigid, 4, napped. As I lay there, I heard the drone of an airplane. At home, I would have thought nothing of it. On the northwest coast of Corsica, the sound was as foreign as the language remained.
A knock drew my attention and Yves stuck his head in the door. "Come look at zhe planes," he beckoned.
I followed him to the stone balcony that faced the bowl of a bay in the Mediterannean. The bright yellow planes, the color of the winner's jersey on the Tour de France, took turns swooping into the Mediterranean Sea below us. Like pelicans going in for a catch, the planes skimmed the water, filling their red, hollow bellies with water. The planes then buzzed away to drop their loads of water on the fires in the mountains beyond.
We walked up the road to the top of the mountain, searching for smoke or a glimpse of the fire. We couldn't spot either, so we returned to our normal life, eating extravagant meals, lying on the beach,  playing tennis.
Corsica is a very dry island, with part of the land being a desert. In the sparsely-populated island, fires started and spread quickly without the benefits of fire hydrants or firefighters close by. Even if the island was lush with firefighters, it might take hours for fire trucks, on barely passable roads that twist through the mountains with sharp drop offs on one side and walls of rock on the other, to reach the spot where the fire burned .
A week later, on a Saturday night, we were driving to a nearby village. We looked up to see bright orange lights in some far away mountains. The next morning, the bells of the church rang loudly in the background while we stood watching smoke billow from a mountain across the water. Most of the day the mountain seemed to burn. We pulled out the binoculars to search for flames, but the dense smoke blocked the view of the flames.
On Monday morning, the faint acrid smell of smoke hung in the air. By afternoon, small pieces of ash fell into the gardens and on the house, as if we lived near a recently erupted volcano.
We ventured down to the beach, but the expanse along the water began to feel closed in as the smoke rose in huge clouds blocking out the sun. We heard the now familiar whir of the planes buzzing above the Mediterranean, like so many dragonflies searching for a clear place to swoop down to the water.
Children and adults rushed down to the edge of the water to watch the planes at work. The planes, tipped at a careful angle to gather water then take off again, slowly pulled away from the sea, full of their lifesaving load.
That afternoon, the windows in the house grew dark as the smoke billowed across the sky blocking out the light. I took the girls to the lower level and began to read them stories to distract them from the fire.
"Are we safe here?" I wanted to ask. The house was made of stone but had lots of wood, plus the roof could catch fire.
"Should we evacuate?" I wondered.
But I was still young enough to believe that wildfires weren't really dangerous and I trusted the judgment of the real adults in the house as I huddled in the lower level. I heard the swoosh of water from a hose as Monsieur Berger watered down the roof of the house to thwart any sparks. His children called to him to come inside, this elderly Frenchman who fought in World War II and was captured by the Germans. He refused to turn off the hose, to retreat into his Corsican vacation home and huddle with his family away from the flames.
The house didn't burn.

This was the door to our lower level.
One day, we found a snake coiled in the stones there.

The next morning we took a trip across the island. We saw the blackened mountains and the skeletons of small shrubs brown and brittle. In places, stood geometric shapes of green, miraculously hopped over by the fire.  On our drive back home, the smell of smoke alerted us to another fire. A thick cloud of smoke surrounded the car and the orange flames came into view, having already engulfed some small trees, leaving branches blackened. The popping and crackling of the burning plants reached our ears as we drove the car away from the flickering flames.
A lone fire truck wound slowly around the mountain, its blue light flashing solemnly, as we rounded a cliff and came face to face with a quarter moon whose white face reflected the flames turning it orange in the sky.

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