The Hard Goodbye

This Saturday morning, I'll leave once again for the Driftless, that distant place in northeastern Iowa and southwestern Wisconsin where tall bluffs covered in forests rise up from the upper Mississippi.  I'll be working the usual gigs: naturalist, interpretive park ranger, and data entry for some of the birding surveys.  As excited as I am, I know it means saying a hard goodbye.

 Especially to Tiger-Puppy and his owner.

From Kansas to Wisconsin to Missouri to Wisconsin to Missouri then back to Wisconsin and finally back to Kansas, over and over dozens of times, I once thought of myself as very good at saying goodbye.  I said it so often, so easily, always expecting to return.

My head knows that it's time to head down that dusty trail again, to get on with life, for real this time.  When I imagine all the things I'll be getting to do over the next six months, I start getting really amped.  The lay-at-night-awake-but-in-a-good way excited.  But then I'll be riding broomstick-horses with my oldest nephew around the yard, trying so hard to memorize every detail and burn it into my heart's memory, and the inevitable bloom of sad wistfulness will rise in my chest. 





It's not the leaving that I'm sad about.  It's the fact that time won't stop while I'm gone.  I know I will always come back to Kansas, but things will never be the same.  My nephews will grow up whether I want them to or not, my parents will take trips and buy a new car and keep remodeling the house, my sister's family will spend their first summer in their new house. Slowly, but surely, we will change.  I know that for the rest of my life, I will look back on the past six months and wish with all my heart that I could go back.  This, this right here, is what I will want to return to, because even with the struggles and the bad days and the waiting for better days, these are the good times.

When things start feeling too bittersweet, I start imagining what the day will be like when I come for a visit again.  I will marvel at how much my nephews have grown, I will tell my friends and family stories of the Driftless, I will cook again in the kitchen with my mother, and I will lazily stretch out on my sister's couch and listen to my sister's tales of being an elementary teacher. 

That will be a good day.