The Wonder of Grown Kids

They are brave and brilliant, and they still squabble at bedtime

My kids are home from college, the younger one for the first time since she left for school in September. We have sat together drinking tea and looking at old photos. We have resurrected every inside family joke we can remember and laughed at all of them. We’ve played darts, watched movies on our same old couches in our same old seats, cooked together and baked together and drunk beers together. In short, it has been lovely. They both go back to school on Sunday, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here today, except to reflect for a moment on the wonder of grown kids. You pour over their faces and hands when they are little, wondering how they will be when they are grown, what they will look like, who they will look like, what they will love and lose themselves in, and it all feels like a great mystery. But then you look back from age nineteen or twenty-one and think, well of course, how could I not have seen how it would be? It was there all along. They were right there the whole time.

A Week at the Lake with Grown Kids

We came for a vacation
but the first night
he fixed the rickety loft ladder
with popsicle sticks

We had to eat the popsicles first

She wrote jewel box poems
so brief and so perfect
like the miniature portraits
painted by the Spanish artist
whose name I can never remember

They used to squabble over binoculars
They still squabble over binoculars

But they change the world
They fix the world
They manufacture hope
in a hopeless age and still
they fight over the bathroom 
at night and who gets to fish
off the dock first