It is the last day, the last night of Lucy being at home.
Tomorrow she goes back to school, and today we have been packing.
It feels terribly, achingly sad. The summer is over. The first faint scents of autumn are beginning to drift into the air, and the children, like the swifts, will be gone.
I do not want to lose them. Even Number Two Daughter has only got another three weeks, and then she will be off to join Mrs. Number Two Daughter, for her second summer of the year, in Australia. She is going to become a fruit picker for a few months, because the Australians do not ski in October, and if you do a horrible job in Australia for a while then they will let you have a longer Australian visa.
I will have an empty nest, and there is a lump in my throat even from just thinking about it.
Of course this is the only time that I will have a lump in my throat. Once they have all actually gone I will have a splendid life in which I never need to cook pizza, and everywhere will stay tidy, and the washing will diminish to nothing. I will unearth forks and plates from their bedrooms and scrub their bathrooms and wash dog paw prints from their sheets, and my little world will become manageably quiet and neat again. I would be fibbing completely if I said that I missed them when they were not at home, because actually I don’t in the least, any more than they miss me.
I like the idea of missing them, though, and occasionally there are odd sad moments when the memory of the children makes me feel sentimental. The Moments of Departure are always awfully sad, it is horrible to say goodbye to each other. I am not in the least looking forward to that bit.
I am looking forward to lying in bed instead of getting up when Oliver needs breakfast before work, though. That bit will be good.
Oliver had his last day at work today. He does not go back to school until Wednesday. He came home and counted the contents of his wallet, with some satisfaction. He has had a lucrative summer, and was feeling very pleased with himself.
I flapped about packing things. This bit of back-to-school is always a colossal event involving much head-scratching and milling about, rushing upstairs and then hanging about trying to remember what I went for, making lists and losing them, and realising too late that I need to buy something crucial.
Today’s packing was relatively uneventful, by the standards of packing, which makes me think that I must have forgotten about something important. Oliver has outgrown his rugby boots, his trousers and his tweed jacket, so our impecunity is assured for a while longer. Also he seems to have lost all of his underpants. I know that he had twelve pairs. He has got four now, and has got no idea where all the rest might have gone, festooned all over the north of Scotland and Portugal I imagine.
I wandered around looking, hopefully, for a while, in case some underpants might materialise on the kitchen dresser or in the boot cupboard, you never know, but of course they didn’t. After that I went to look in the camper van. This turned out to be a mistake, because some people were there taking photographs of it, and the resulting sociability took nearly half an hour, after which I had forgotten that I was supposed to be looking for underpants, and had to go back again later.
Mark did not become involved with the packing. He looked doubtfully at the piles of trunks and kit bags and duvets and shoes, and sloped off out into the garden to carry on mixing cement. This was made difficult by the cement mixer breaking.
It does this sometimes. The stock man at the builder’s yard opposite gave it to Mark because it was broken, and Mark fixed it so that we could use it. Now it works like a cement mixer which has belonged to a company of local builders for most of its life, which means that it is not always very reliable, and sometimes it stops what it is doing at inconvenient moments.
He fixed it again, patiently, and then built the last flower bed. This will mean that we can put the soil there, and have a clear space to start demolishing the sheds.
It is such an exciting project.
I wish that we had more time for it all.
Maybe once the children have gone.
