On the day she drives out to return her prom dress and shop for college stuff with her roommate, Sophie receives another blow. For real. She is returning the gorgeous long gown that never got worn, spinning gold into straw, which is the bizarre reversal of life these days. Taking everything known and good and exciting, and tossing it back into the pool of unknown.

School opening delayed. UVA has decided to suspend its much awaited move-in date until September. “Out of precaution for our students, faculty, and staff…” I can see her pause, mid-shop, throw pillows and nesting storage containers still in the cart, while she takes in this sweeping announcement. How does she know before I do? Was it emailed to her? Texted? Talk about unwanted “notifications.” Hastily I scan the UVADaily Report, which I dutifully read each morning, look for late-breaking or special emails. Nothing. It hasn’t even been released yet, but like the day the senior year died, Sophie is first on the scene. I came home from my walk to find her upstairs watching the Governor’s address on her laptop, face glowing with the same stricken grief and horror like the towers were coming down. Too stunned to turn away from the screen.

Other colleges will likely follow…this is just the rumbling of the coming demise. How does she already know? Student portal. Hah! What an oxymoron that is these days, as you can open it but it leads nowhere, like one of those false doors opening to a blank brick wall. Sophie go…no go.

For this reason, perhaps, or maybe just innocent personality type that avoids clutter, she’s been holding off on “the college pile” –that amassing of domestic goods all coordinated and NWT (new with tags for those of you who see the resale value in everything you purchase), that occupies a growing corner of her room.  It is a parents’ totem–some of the last things you will take from me as you leave my land. Memories and blessings in the form of dorm gear. Some of the last things I can teach you while still under my roof: microfiber versus cotton, Egyptian versus ring-spun, standard measurements of a twin, non-stick versus stainless, the dangers of plastics, all the lore of living away from home.

Slowly, her pile grows. The fresh appeal of new linens, shower caddy, matching bath towels, everything coordinated with a roommate’s haul and new in package. I think part of it has always been this way: living 18 years in a space made for her by others and gradually shirking it–shrugging away fairy lamps and flowered bedspreads, childhood mementos pinned to the walls, little daisy nightlight spurned as if it were a direct assault on her developing personhood–adamant, evolving, and as proportionately unsentimental as us moms are all sentimental this time of year. It’s why we are even considering the $3000 housing bill when all of the classes will be taught online. Because let’s face it, I got a free one upstairs, right here. And mine comes with a killer dining plan and free laundry, too. But no… I get it, daughter. This new room on campus has an appeal I cannot supply or purchase, because it represents things the way they would be, should be, must be, will be on the day you finally have your say. I get it. New = YOU.

Maybe this year the décor matters more because they are going to spend so much more time looking at it, quarantined in their rooms, taking classes online and eating take-out from the dining hall in the dorm. Isn’t this the first place they’ll be ordered when one of their classmates tests positive? It’s a nest all right, with a retro-fitted revolving door. Can’t help feeling we are nesting against fate, stockpiling hangers and choosing laundry hampers against the unspoken reality: You may never wear these clothes to class.

She needs to love her space because when she gets there it will be her life support capsule on a strange new planet. Most, if not all, her fall classes will be taught online. And, as the fine print spells it out, lest we feel duped into paying the whopping bill: In-person class status can change at any time. Make sure you can sit on that trendy comforter my dear, daily, and that your walls are suitably blank for Zoom. I don’t know why we’re not loading up on pajama pants. I told you, at Bizarro-U two masks will be issued in the “welcome packets” and two pocket-sized sanitizers, along with some weird claw-contraption thing for opening door knobs without touching them. Well, there’s something. At least they believe we will still be opening doors.

There’s a part of launching a college kid that’s nostalgic, like opening a drawer that hasn’t been touched in 30 years. It’s one of the few specific life experiences to come along that I clearly, quickly and deeply relate to. Much of their adolescent years I have been slowly devolving until I feel very much the dinosaur in search of my cozy old cave, content (enough) to release them to the fray. Grateful to my God for his protection and their preparedness. After all, obsolescence has such a comfy Saturday afternoon appeal to it; I was getting used to it.

But with this college thing, I feel young and relevant and “on” again, and like more than a bankroll for trendy dorm décor. I may have never been this beautiful or connected or accomplished or smart, but I have been a college student. Oh yes. Almost 11 years in fact, undergrad then grad then graduate school again and then teacher. I loved it. Campus was my world. Nowadays it’s all changed, of course, no one wants my wisdom on how to cook a 5-course meal in a hot pot. Go figure, the dorms all have state-of-the art kitchen nicer than mine. No need to instruct on how to rig a washing machine for multiple cycles on the same quarter, at GMU laundry is “free” (Well, okay. About as “free” as five classes and full room and board is on the bill I receive each semester).

Still, it is pretty ironic and amusing, this day I am telling you about. When she comes home, re-miseried from the UVA pronouncement and wordlessly carries her bags of loot upstairs, I can’t help but follow. I notice the fringe and natural fibers, the Boho hippie wanna-be look is all back in. I know she could not in a million years imagine the same of her old mother, but wow…the similarities are striking. And heartwarming. I remember the shopping trip I went on with my own mother, so many decades ago… her helping me into this exciting new chapter in the Book of Possibilities. If only I had saved my décor–why, I could have saved us a pile there, daughter. (I’m telling you, if I wait long enough turtlenecks will come back in vogue.) I am just waiting out that giant cycle of life taking its mammoth turn. With Covid of course, we fear we have been nudged out of orbit, that our trajectory is off, maybe so much so we’ve been flung from it, no longer returning. But we are. We will have our reentry–hotter, harder and forever altered, bearing the scars of our experience as we scream back into life, but re-enter we will. Thank you for flying Space=X. This time around, though, must admit the launching feels a little like the Armageddon. I’ll give you throw pillows. I feel like throwing bricks.

I once had a college English teacher who thought the best way to rouse us on a weekday morning sitting in his class on romantic poetry was to alert us to the coming of the second millennium. This was 1985 and I was a sophomore. Let me dwell here a moment on the meaning of that term, which is way more than 2nd year. Sophomore. From the Greek sophos, “wise,” and moros meaning “foolish, dull”… “intellectually pretentious, overconfident, conceited, and immature.” Yep. That about sums it up. And here was a large man at large university located in the cow pastures of rural Connecticut going off-script to lecture on an event almost a generation away. Half the class was probably hungover and a good third asleep, but we all sat up a little straighter and just stared at him. Mr. Wilkerson. Along with Coleridge and the Lake Poets he proceeded to prophesy, even a little Moses like, about the crossing over. Y2K. He knew he would not see that promised land, “But you will,” he assured us. You will. You are the generation who will span the millennia. Like it was really something to see. It was so out of context and forward thinking I remember it shocked me, once I realized he was serious. “You have a rare and privileged vantage point,” I remember him saying, “and when you get there you will be the generation who spans two millennia like none other in human history. You must look as far back as you look ahead… and be careful what you pack for the journey.” Wow, Professor! You got all that from reading Keats?? !

From all the signs and talk of it, “College Move-in 2020” is like no other year. We got our marching orders last month, and our schools are similar to all the others–the “staggered”  approach to those days when campus is alive and crowded with students moving in. I’ll give you staggered. My heart staggers under the weight of all the change, confusion and chaos you can sense right behind all the protocols and procedures. Masks don’t hide everything. I know they’re trying to put up a good front. We all are. Ellie has a 5:30 “appointment” for her move-in: two guests allowed on campus for two hours. Thirty-seven thousand students on that campus. If they have to close this time around, she will be asked to move out the same day, like you were never there.

Sophie has, or had, a move-in appointment, that’s what just got pushed back, with the two-for-two as well. I have heard of some institutions allowing only one “guest.” I have heard of some allowing none, not even the college student: Y’all just stay home online till we get the kinks worked out. So our situation seems to be among the better. We are “still going” –although going into what I couldn’t tell you.

Among the essentials my freshman is asked to bring is a “Go Bag.” For real! A small packed suitcase for you (or your roommate) to grab if you have to go into quarantine. As if Covid-19 hasn’t impressed upon us all the notion that life is fleeting, transient, unpredictable, even temporary. Now she will have a reminder of that tucked between her microwave and her milkcrates: a packed suitcase.

On move-in day I suspect it will be that one little nagging containment, like an un-cracked nut and a stubborn reminder: you are not really all here. You and your ditties could be evicted in an instant. Oh, my girl…my own nesting instincts reel with you. I never had to live like this. Maybe I should have, and maybe I chose to and maybe I know now that life was never a guarantee, but I would prefer you not have it shoved down your throat. Literally. Immediately before she dropped that bombshell about delayed opening on me, I had texted Sophie my happiness and hope for her as she undertook a completely normal shopping trip for dorm finds. It made me happy that some measure of normal had been restored. If I were in charge of the universe… I said to her …it would be kinder to you. Now they are all of them registered for a new college class this semester: “Just in Case 101,” never a graduate level course and somehow, you never pass, so you just have to keep retaking it.

The UVA daily newsletter is filled with positivity, professionalism, precaution. For heaven’s sake, this is a research institution attached to a nationally-ranked medical facility. People with degrees from the same Alma Mater my freshman will one day hold are actually advancing the cause for a vaccine. Won’t their mammas be buying up the “proud parent” bumper stickers then! The publicity photos show us temporary classrooms, temporary socially-distant dorms, plexiglass shields and state-of-the-art audio visual equipment installed where past generations took notes in front of a wall-length blackboard. They don’t show show the hasty stockpiling of masks, ventilators, PPEs and all the scrambling that is going on behind the scenes to set up a quarantine and treatment facility, the real “nesting” of our times. Huh. I wonder if Bed Bath & Beyond sells oxygen chambers.

Just on a lark I order two more oral thermometers and a pulse-oximeter for each of my students. (Not really–the lark part–but the order part is real. They come next Friday.) As for the institutions going to “stagger” them into residence: In my mind I tell them…Against this disease you must be an army, and you better not be made of cardboard on a distant hill, set up as a ruse to fool the enemy. You must be the real thing, because what I am sending you surely is. You must be made of flesh and blood and brains that are better educated and equipped to handle Covid than I am. You better be. Or I will be wedging myself into that Go bag.

I’ve had a go-bag in my world for many times, under many different circumstances. As a child I made one out of a favorite satchel to hold favorite things and slung it over a bedpost. Probably following the chapter on “Responsible Parenting,” my dad sat us three down, second-story dwellers in our two story house, and taught us all what to do in the event of a fire. I remember he installed those red circle stickers in the windows that alert the fire department there is a child inside, and sat us down to discuss getting out. How we were to take our desk chairs and break the second story windows and climb out onto a porch roof and jump to the ground, where they would be waiting having exited their first-floor bedroom. It was the responsible parents’ introductory class on safety and survival, a full decade before they drove us to college. My dad was proactive like that. I was no more than seven or eight at the time, so my siblings were younger. The horror of this remote possibility impressed me deeply–enough to carefully pack my first go-bag, containing –what else? Surely not clothing or a toothbrush, but cherished toys and books and things I could never part with. It was perhaps my first inkling that a life well-lived is a life in some way always ready to go. And not the way you thought you were headed, either.

There have been other, less happy needs for a little bag ready to go. You never know. When I worked for Hallmark, one of the marketing inventions we learned to hate was the RTG bag — a preassembled gift bag “Ready to Go,” complete with tissue and curly ribbon already applied that you could grab and purchase, should life get in the way of your gift giving time allotment and you couldn’t be bothered with gift wrap. Because it was convenient and convenience sells, they flew off the shelf for triple the cost of the materials and we were forever fussing with poof-ing tissue and making up more bags ready to go. All of this, of course, begs the question where is it you think you are going. And the metaphysical concept that you can be so ready as to already be there. This may be truing as I speak–in an upstairs bedroom, here…slowly starting to look like a Home Goods aisle. When we go to load all this loot in the car I suspect we will have to look for Sophie, who was so ready to go she is already there. If I were her, though, by this point I’d choose somewhere else.

The happiest “go-bag,” of course, was the little overnight bag hopefully awaiting its trip to the hospital so many years ago. Eighteen, to be exact, and 6 months and 10 days. That was the last time Sophie came with a stockpile, a little mountain of equipment and a layette, as fresh and new as the baby it awaited, almost alive with anticipation and breathing the faintest, sweetest breath of life-to-be. Like a little sigh of joy. Her grandmother washed and folded it and tucked it into the little nursery chest I had painted cherry red. We did not know girl or boy, so most of it was white, pure and uncharted as the little one who would wear it. The possibility and hope coming to life as we waited, our hearts filled with seeping joy for the day, hour, moment when it could be spent on the one it was for. Come to think of it, we had so much for this one we are still spending it. I don’t know why I saved it… Guess with launching them you always find an unsaid word, an unspent prayer or piece of advice, a stray love–something extra to tuck into those bags. I’m a mom, for goodness sake. I am the repository of her childhood, a willing archive of all that has been her for close to twenty years, tangible and otherwise, a place she will never vacate no mater how much she takes with her.

We’re supposed to quarantine two weeks before move-in. Good on paper, not so in practice. May your child, chomping to go, ready to go (or so they think, as we did, too) be made miserable by confining to her (old) room weeks before the actual date. Like a little litmus test: child of mine, with all this upheaval and uncertainty are you sure, absolutely certain, you want to go? Show of hands, people? And every single one goes up. Vestiges of all the arbitrary boundaries we’ve placed on their lives, bedtimes and curfews and done-by times, now this. Come home. Stay home. Only don’t. In Ellie’s case, a college-mandated quarantine (or recommended, depending on your school) will be easy. She already is. She locked in at the beginning of June in the most closed germ pool any community has mastered and has been mask free and hugging the same nine people for the past ten weeks at Camp. (See On Eagles Wings – July 2020). Talking and laughing and spewing harmless droplets and not at all apart because they are germ free. No stickered floors or plexiglass shields or awkward zombie-like pacing to stay away from others. Still, this idyllic existence is predicated entirely on the proposition that she is no where else, and won’t be, for ten weeks.

So our house will serve as little more than a spring board to school. I thought we would have a week with camp girl. Now, not so. As I recently texted her, the fatted calf is going to breathe a big ol’ sigh of relief. Her Isaiah 40 project ends August 17th, and an un-budging university has opened its door to upper classmen August 15-18. So I will drive over to retrieve her from camp and the next day, less than 24 hours later, drive her to school hoping, praying against all reason and nature that I do not see her before Thanksgiving. Like I’m telling you, whoever wished their children away more forcibly and desperately than this batch of freshman moms?  No one, ever. I could practically leave the car running…Will her laundry even be dry by then? Will she notice me creeping into her room that one single night to make sure she is really here? To marvel as I did when they were infants, that they’re really here? That they were really mine? Yes, okay. I know. God told me otherwise, long ago. And life convinced me.

There is a sense of triumph, still. Maybe it is just blind sadness mixed with fear for their well-being. But no, it is triumph, mixed with a little old-fashioned defiance of a mother’s heart: look at this, you %$#@!! world… Look at this you hateful disease, look what I have for you. My kid has all the compassion, good sense, obedience, charity and kindness you need to get through this. I knew you’d be needing some so I packed it in a container named Ellie. Sophie. Handle with care. Do not shake. Apply liberally…  These are MY go-bags, and I fling them out to a needing world. My people have come to terms before they came to you. Show them the way to make good…because that is what each and every one of us needs to be making right now, whether we work in a lab or a kitchen an office or a garden or a dorm room: making good. It can still be made. “Mom!” says Soph–randomly, recently, “I’m so used to things going away, if they told me I could come to Charlottesville and be locked in my room like a prison I would love that. I would just love that.” Oh, really? Did I tell you there’s new research out on Covid-19? Not only does it take away your sense of taste and sense of smell. It totally screws with your sense of normal, and it takes away your sense of entitlement. Splash-down astronaut comment to ground control last week: “You should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year,” he said. Given all the things that have happened this year. (weeping smiley face emoji here). Wow! Interesting perspective at play here. Given! Like, I’ll be returning “those things” faster than you can say prom dress.

When Sophie’s graduation announcements came in the mail months ago she was disappointed with them. Didn’t like what I had done. Mom, you kept that line on there . Why did you put that line? It sounds like I died. “Go in peace.” No, my girl. That’s rest in peace. Go in peace is a commissioning. A sending forth. And a packed wish for you, a pocket blessing that wherever you go, with you will be the peace of Christ. It is unshakeable, this prayer. And it is the foundation of that college pile overtaking your room.

The little pile that goes with her into the world is no longer pure and white, sweet and innocent. It is as colorful and whimsical as her years, an airy, out-there-but-still-me feel to it that must be the branding of their days: I can conquer the world if I want to. Okay, there Sophie girl. If there were ever a time to turn off Netflix, hang up the snapchat, kill the feed and focus on life’s swarming need, now is that time. You’ve AP’d out of Disaster 101 and your paper on World Hurt was pretty good, so, by all means, let’s see what you got. Never mind the hotpot gourmet and laundry work-arounds, daughter, we are fast-tracking your curriculum to (literally) survival. You want to stay on campus? You want to be part of this giant experiment proposed by some of the smartest minds in the state that is still, let’s face it, nothing more than an experiment? Check the air filtration system before you enter a building. Don’t drink, party, or congregate. If you’re going to date, heaven forbid, try a microbiologist or an epidemiologist. They’re the only ones who have a clue. Stay 6-8 feet apart from even your roommate if you can, and get used to the idea. We are, these days, physically an island but metaphysically connected, so connected. It’s why why we can’t get too far down the road, because your day of moving-in is inextricably (and ironically) linked to all the beach parties Virginia threw five and six weeks ago.

Nothing has taught us more about the human condition than microbiology. Butterfly effect, baby. You may feel like a tiny drop, an inconsequential and independent dot of your own marking and making, but daughter, the decisions we are making are huge and life-lasting. Like my nutty Mr. Wilkerson and his Y2K: You are being given a rare and privileged vantage point. Make sure to look as far back as you look forward. Do you remember the cry in the early days of the pandemic, when so many were locked down and death was all around? In the crowded apartment buildings in European cities people came out to the balconies and shouted to the besieged medical workers as a show of support. To be strong, to prevail. Their cry was ‘jiāyóu! — which means to “keep up the fight” but literally translates to “add oil.” It was a cry to be ready, to fill your oil lamps, you bridesmaids, be ready, for you do not know the hour or the outcome. We have, then, never really known at all. We stand at the crossing looking both ways, forward and back, without any certainty what tomorrow may bring. A go-bag is just a little reminder to be ready. What it really means, my girls, is don’t forget to take a moment, to just cherish the day.

Sophie is devastated by the set back, but only for a night. I watch her resilience right her dinged heart. My word, this prayer: may the germs fall off her as quickly as the disappointments do, for clearly she is made of Teflon. Prom dress relinquished, college stockpile slowly growing for its day even if that day is Y3K, this girl is strong. The dress alone–it is a college pre-mester right here in my own home, for which I didn’t have to pay a dime: purchased with joy, clung to with hope, returned not with despair but with determination, foresight, pragmatism and resolve that will, ultimately, see her through. On her way upstairs later with a furtive posture she will pass me, smuggled bowl of pita chips in hand. That’s a no-go in our house. “Sophie! Are you taking food upstairs in my house?!” Mine: indignation. Hers: a steady declaration, and even a hint of defiance in her downturned eyes. Remember her hurting heart? It reaches now for a wry smile and a wisp of humor. “Noooowuh…” she pauses, making sure I can see the wink in her eye… “I am taking it to my dorm room.”