Well...

My Mom called yesterday
from California
where she and my Dad are spending the winter
at her sister's home.
She said he wants to stay there
permanently.
I responded, then
in the solitude I found as she spoke,
I choked back tears.
They were still evident in my voice when she drew me back to the conversation with a question about my niece.
For 10 years, I longed to live near my parents again.
For one and a half years I have basked in the wonderfully close relationship that we have enjoyed here--dinners at each other's houses, making bread or jam or applesauce together, outings to the beach, hikes with the kids...
If they leave...this is so much less "home" to me.
The family that I am close to lives back there, in that place I hated.
I have family here, too, but the 15 years I lived away left a distance between us.
They feel like strangers;
I feel like an outsider.
Maybe it won't work out.
Maybe they will just continue to spend winters there, and summers here.
I know that my Dad always thinks every change is The Cure.
Not the band...
but the solution to Everything That's Wrong With Him.
The depression, the dizzy spells...the working 34% of his one remaining kidney?
Sigh.
I will roll with it.
But I am probably not done crying.
If they really don't come back
and we continue to have no relationship with younger stepson
and older stepson graduates
or not
and Sweetest Love's company continues to not hire him for an engineering position
then maybe it IS time to move.

Sigh.

Other than All That?
Life is grand.
Spring is here, love is all around, and I am going to tear up this summer!