Empty nest. Blessing or bane? Aye, that is the question the question that almost every mama and papa has to look at straight in the heart.
Step into a room once occupied by your child or children. Listen. You can hear the familiar easy laughter, a sob or two, the whispers after lights out.
But open the closet and you find absolutely nothing. It's stripped, abandoned, and that's all there is to that.
The child or the children might come back on their vacations, for visits, for holidays, or when their money runs out, and generally all of that's lovely, but the shock of the initial departure has already registered.
Anyway, this is a subject that's been on my mind since a reader in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., wrote to tell a little story about a real empty nest.
Seems that while she was still living in the Midwest, a pair of robins began constructing a nest atop an 8-foot metal ladder under her kitchen windows.
Thus began the cycle, the hatching of three tiny blue eggs, the feeding and care of the fledglings and the woman had a bird's-eye view of the whole show.
For three years she packed away the nest in a storage shed and replaced it on the ladder for the birds to reuse each spring. Then, simply, the cycle ended.
Last April, before my pen pal migrated to Central Florida, she made sure to keep that same nest in storage back in the Midwest, explaining that it reminded her of her own brood who'd flown her nest. "I just couldn't throw it away."
Sad? Well, yes, a trifle. The empty nest always seems a little emptier during the holidays. But, listen, how cold it would be with no memories at all.
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