Waving from the driveway

We used to drive off looking forward, excited to be on the road, carloads of college students heading back to school or young adults heading to apartments, friends and jobs in faraway places. There was always a treat or two tucked into the car somewhere, a gift from home to be appreciated later on. Sometimes, it was as simple as homemade chocolate chip cookies. One time, my father gave me a stalk of bananas from one of his trees to take back to school and share.

That’s about 80 finger bananas. Delicious, thin skinned, rarely sold commercially.

Another time, I took cuttings from our yard to grow into houseplants. Houseplants are just tropical plants anyway, and Miami is sub tropical. I also drove north with a giant cactus once, a cutting from the one in front of our house. I had to be real careful about stretching over the back of the seat while driving.

I thought about where I was going, what I would do when I got there. I never thought about the parents on the driveway waving goodbye, what it was like to still be there when your kids drive off. I didn’t have the experience to think about it.

My oldest daughter and her boyfriend are heading to Austin, TX, where she will be a grad student in creative writing this fall. They drove from NC, about an eight hour drive, and spent the night here. It’s really a wonderful coincidence that we are on the way and at a good stopping point. They are taking both their cars there, which means that they can’t drive all night because there is nobody to take turns with. And of course, it was great to visit with them.

They went swimming and then I made tofu fajitas. I did some last week as an experiment and they were so good, we knew we needed to make them for Kendra and Colin, both vegetarians. We talked, we took a walk. She chose some books to take with her. This morning, I showed Kendra my garden and Kurt showed off the chickens. She’s always been interested in gardening and a lot of the domestic pursuits I like. Actually, both girls like to cook.

I printed off directions from our house to their next stopping point. And then they needed to hit the road. We hugged, hugged again. I sent her forth to her new adventure with homegrown hard boiled eggs and a Brandywine tomato half the size of her head, gifts to be eaten and cherished sometime tonight, shared in a hotel room in Hope, Arkansas.

When I stood on the patio and waved, I thought about my mother waving from the driveway of our house in Miami. Then I turned and went inside, thinking my life was a little boring as perhaps she did, remembering the road trips of her youth.