I have got to stop drinking coffee with dinner! It’s 1:30 in the morning and I feel like I could power the Christmas train all by myself. (Oh, yeah…) Like many women this season, I stay up late to get things done, but also it’s to be in a house stilled and dotted with light. This, the season of it: candles in the windows, little illuminated churches and votives placed about, brand new roll of 900 LED “warm white” on the tree (How do you say OVERKILL–?! Amazon review says they’re dim, but you could read small-print instruction manuals in our living room with the lights out.) The whole house simmers with silence and glows at this hour, like something really, really good is going to happen and I don’t want to miss it. That’s Advent for you. The original FOMO.

Is thinking about your kids sleeping the same as tucking them in? We may be too far gone for visions of sugar plums but the children, and their dad, are nestled and snug.  I know they sleep how they spend their days: Will, like a figure frozen mid-move–will be half-splayed out of a sleeping bag ideal for 20 below but not for a residential home. He got tired of making his bed so he sleeps on top of it in a sleeping bag. Probably happened this summer when Camille, the French kid who came to us, never made his. I can see his clothes on the floor and his sax gleaming in the corner, warmly fingered by the colored lights on his little desk tree, and on his window–like a curtain–a “net light” intended for a bush but hanging vertically instead and wired to a rheostat so he can brighten and dim it while going to sleep. Poor man’s strobe, he shows me. He will sleep with his face pressed right up close to the window. His last call from the bed each night is not “Good night!” but “Can I open my window??” (Is the heat or AC on?) EVERY night. “Can I open my window?” Often times I’ll go in to find his face plastered to a tiny opening crack as if the only real air worth breathing is out there.

Boy is like that. Outside animal. He still bikes and go-carts and this year caught fire for boy scouts. Pyromania metaphors work well for Will as, at 13, he is as intense and strong as his name, and he refines by first destroying: My patience. My nerves. My control. My “wisdom.” Ahhhh, how it glows. For Will, the more challenging the better. His troop does cold weather camps all winter, and next spring break he’s signed up for a 100-mile hike. I like that. Feet are closer to the ground than thumbs anyway; should use ’em more often. What powers Boy? Gasoline and cereal bars. He also responds well to kindness, praise, and off-color YouTube clips. And playing his sax. He just took a gig for an absent tuba player in the Greater Richmond youth band and had a ball. He has 7 or 8 alarm clocks parked around his room, all a little off, so each morning at 6 comes an electronic symphony calling him (and the rest of the house) –to what? His sense of purpose is usually not with him that early, but he’ll pick up speed as we go along. Oh, speaking of speed… On his workbench is the latest project, commenced at (you pick) 10 pm or 10 minutes before the bus. I couldn’t figure at first what he was doing with an “old” digital camera and a carboard box, box cutter and a couple slabs of Polyurethane foam. That doesn’t look like a school project to me, son. The next evolution involves duct tape and bungee cords, as he straps the contraption to his electric skateboard, and I realize with growing maternal glee mixed with horror: It’s a homemade Go-Pro.

Sophie girl, she equally intent and even more on the move. She’s also a little more “plugged-in.” When I go to check on her, the screen by her bed will still be warm and twitchy, having been in solid use all day. I might even find her awake, schoolbooks and binders splayed about her bed like pets she wishes she had instead of all these killer classes. If I touch her or lean over her sleeping form she’ll pop awake, so near the edge and running the to-do tapes is she. Last night’s panic? That UVA is going to rescind her admission if she can’t pass this exam in AP Physics. Talk about connected! Two years ago I sat next to her at Ellie’s graduation and watched her make little notes in the margins of the program as to the various honors, scholarships, and awards being offered. Then she went back to school and earned them. Like me, two years ago, starting on my mission to score Hamilton tickets at Broadway in Richmond this fall. She’s just not going to miss her shot. Cavaliers, here we come!

It’s not an accident or an oversight, the absence of a photo. In some ways it’s a reality. Unless you want one of me and ol’ Gus the dog. My favorite birthday gift this year (October)–and a gift it was–was piling into my “new” car (2016, bought in August) and realizing that this was the first time the five of us had ridden together in a car for almost a year. Made the birthday dinner seems like a grand event, a state dinner. I would be less surprised to find myself seated next to a foreign ambassador than buckling in beside the three I bore whose mantra is “anywhere but here.”

If we did have a family photo, which we don’t, Sophie would be photo-shopped in, for though she lives in our house she is either (a) at school, (b) at work (c) at swim practice (d) at a friend’s or (e) out. I don’t want to do the math because her absence would make me sad, but if she were my employee I would have to fire her, ‘cause there ain’t no 40 hours here. A couple words come to mind. One is capable. She has been this way since she kicked my home-school to the curb and hopped on a public-school bus at five years old. The college admission process (for me) has been a lovely experience of left-out. I did know about the UVA early decision, and we are bustin’ with excitement and pride for her, but the others that went in this fall? I only know where/when she applied because of the application fee charge pinging my online credit card statement!

Ellie’s room is empty, for a short while, but it waits for her with a calm contentment, filled with memories and all the trappings she left behind. (GMU, sophomore year, psychology). It is one of the happiest rooms of the house, and the morning sunlight streaming in can revive dying house plants, brighten the day, or warm a cat miffed at our thrifty thermostat settings. It is also the showroom of our future, there, Burk Motel. Like those mini mock dorm rooms they put up in student unions. Coordinated bedding and such. I walk into it to see what life is going to be like for the Burks in a few short years. The good news is, we are operating as an Airbnb for college girl way more than I might have anticipated. Several times a semester she comes home on the train, giving life that special “going places” feel to it that I so crave in land-locked middle age. Like something bigger is happening I will soon be part of again. I love that she shuttles and metros and trains to wherever she needs to be. She is living her on-foot days right now, the ones I remember so well. Feet make great navigators. Life as seen by pedestrian Braille.

This summer her room was lived in for a short and wondrous time by a little French boy named Camille. He and Will—Bang! Instant friends who wouldn’t know a language barrier if it were built in brick right in front of them. There are so many other languages out there, after all. For a summer we spoke fluent Boy, Pyromania, and Gadget. We spoke river and swimming pool, road trip and backyard. Will, have you done your reading today? “Yes, Mom! That’s why they invented subtitles.” Instant friends in a life instantly more fun. Like all my ‘keds,” I stalk him on Instagram and come up wanting. That liar, social media. To know this kid makes anything he can post, chip, snap, toot or tweet a sham of the real boy. What did he leave here when he took my heart back to France? A toothbrush, a charger and a pair of shorts. Sounds like all you need for another month-long stay, come back, Camille! In reflecting afterward on what made the “exchange” (for so much more was received than given) so memorable, I realized this Riviera wild-man made time stand still and gave us back a bit of our fleeting family.

Speaking of fleeting, observe my beloved. Bill is bus-driving full time now, so I don’t suppose he gets much house a-glow time like this. For him the “wee hours” may involve chipping ice off a bus windshield in the dark or coaxing a frozen engine to life. He goes to bed as deliberately as he rises from it in the morning–early, intentionally, slightly distracted, like there might be somewhere else he would rather be, ol’ Bus Driver Bill. Sorry, that’s Father Bus Driver Bill. He says he loves the kids. And sometimes he collects one he knows. On a recent sub run he stopped at the home of a parishioner’s family. Little boy clomps onto the bus, looks at Bill hard, confused, and then says brightly, “Hey! Don’t you go to my church?” Though I’m sure he would choose a different verb, he is the longest standing priest in the Diocese of Virginia and has certainly seen some changes. But our God is good, and He is good all the time. Last Sunday our son Will, last in line and a defender of the faith and our family if ever there were one, was confirmed before a loving and supporting Body of Christ. I told you something really, good was going to happen.

And now for the really, really good. Because caffeine will only get you so far. I stay up late to know the silence and the light of Christmas, coming again, as right and reliable as the God who promised it. This old house, and the rooms I pass through on my way to bed, they are never dark this time of year. In every one I can see myself. And in every moment I can see Him. Emmanuel.

Blessings to you at yours this Christmas, with love from the Burks