Getting Results

My cell rang as I drove towards home, the flat golden soybean fields of southern Indiana sliding past me.  It was William.  Excitedly, he told me that the second chrysalis had turned black!  Only an hour after I last wrote on this blog and posted the photo of the blackened chrysalis and trying to get ready to leave on a two day trip to see colleges, William had called, "Mom, it HATCHED!"  Sure enough, the beautiful butterfly had emerged, still wet and unable to fly.   We propped up the lid so it could fly away.  We couldn't stay to watch - it was time for us to leave.

Anna and I have been visiting colleges, searching for her future.  Each place is so different, with so varied a type a life:  a cosmopolitan city life full of bustling students, an intense and vigorous lifestyle or a quiet, rural contemplative place, more nurturing and slower paced.  What fits her?

It hits me as I talk with professors and students alike that here I am, in the second half of my life, living the quite rural life, away from the stimulation of the scholarly world.  They seem so confident, so absorbed in their fields.  All the subjects pull at me.  I would study them all.  I would enjoy this environment.  The only one that does not pull at me is the one I majored in.  "You can skip that building,"  I think.  I don't want to tour the engineering building.

Instead, I work to find what will fulfill and fit my girls.  It appears that Lauren has landed in the perfect place, already, as her professor says, "making a presence".   I must find another perfect fit for Anna.  My feet, or more particularly, my recently redesigned foot, is having a hard time keeping up.

Notes:

After Communion, William whispered, "I think I got a stale one."

Finished reading:  Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet.