Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it’s been…

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It seems that I have reach just such a point in my life. With the graduation of my youngest child from High School and as she heads off to college like her brother before her we now have an empty nest (except for Orion our Labrador, picture Marley age 9).  It is hard to believe how fast we have gone from new parents to empty nest.  It has been 21 years filled with the usual ups and downs of parenting and child rearing.  Both of our children are intelligent and talented individuals that are as different as night and day.  While the day-to-day experiences of this period seemed unremarkable, there were moments that seem remarkable at the time but as time passed they quickly assumed a level of normalcy that was just part of life.

Now as I think back over these years I see a very different landscape and so "it occurs to me: what a long, strange trip it’s been."  We have had weeks in the hospital, the anxiety of test results, traveling hockey teams, late nights, early mornings, winter Olympics, cross-country moves, fishing and crabbing trips, puppies, dance lessons, swim lessons, scuba lessons, DRIVING LESSONS, vacations, European adventures, flute lessons, scuba trips, golf lessons and school.  With all those lessons they, no we, have learned a lot.

In my minds eye I see something reminiscent of the vista from Dead Horse Point in Canyonlands.  A stark landscape soften by the meandering Colorado river.  Cliffs artfully sculpted by that same river.  A solid foundation of rock, layers of time and life that have been exposed, carved and shaped by years of the rivers gentle influence.  I know that much of this was done by torrential rain, flash flood or earthquake but those are all gone and at this moment there is just the river and the beauty of the cliffs.  So it is with my life.  The ever present river of time kept us moving and slowly and gently shaped us all.  In between we had our days of brilliant sunshine, torrential rains, flash floods and even some earthquakes.  These shaped our lives at times dramatically but the most dramatic was the slow, gentle and subtle carving of the river over time.

So now as I survey this landscape that has been our life, the sun drifts low in the western sky.  Soon it will set and this chapter will be history.  But it will rise again in east on a new day and a the next chapters of our life.  I can only hope that this will be "a long, strange trip" too.  I have my best friend, my partner, my helpmate, my lover, my wife and my eternal companion at my side, so the trip is sure to be fun.