I have that ache I get in my heart when the leaving time comes. The hugs, unspoken sadness and the drop off at the airport, all pull at me in the core of my belly. I was not designed for modern life. I need friends and family at my fingertips, not scattered in far flung locations around the globe. 

My son’s wife, Khrystyne is in Los Angeles. She has the flu today, a raw throat, fever and headaches. I want to walk over with chicken soup, tea and flowers for the table, bend down, kiss her forehead and tell her not to worry. 

I want to walk an ocean beach, share lunch and talk about writing and poetry with Dicksie. I want to see her paintings take shape and listen to the dreams she dreamed, but she is in Arizona. 

I long to sit at the large wooden table in my sister Kristen’s kitchen, soak in stories about the children in her life,  and watch as she rides her bike to school and back. I want to feel our 60 years of history and know the open place in her heart that remembers ‘us’ and expands to embrace me whenever I appear. 

My empty house will fill in quickly with work assignments, clients, phone calls and challenges.  I’ll welcome them, as I blend again inside my days, the fullness of friends, family and routine. But there will be that raw place first, that invisible surge that pushes against an old aloneness I work to live above. It will hit me like cold water as I open the door.  

The mother hen in me wants to gather the people I love around me, enfolding them in my wings. I send emails instead. 

The clouds form a solid cover outside the window in shades of iridescent pearl. They perch above an expanse of blue mountains and rust covered earth. It’s seven o’clock in the morning. The blast furnace that is Phoenix sits unfelt inside the cool cabin of the plane. Another lift off.  Another coming.  Another going.  Another touching down.