I’m not sure the lady at the grocery store knew what to make. But hey, she asked. “Well… not so great, actually,” I respond. “I think I’m letting the big stuff get to me, you know? Stressing me out so I fret about the little stuff.” I’m rambling a little, unloading groceries onto the belt. “Oh, you got college kids?” She says as she checks, I bag. She is behind a plexiglass screen, a face shield and a pretty serious looking mask so, points for perception there, Tina. Melt-down, aisle four. But no, she is just making pleasant conversation as I unload the contents of my cart and do my own bagging at the other end. She zaps and transfers a carton of eggs into my hands, then it’s her turn for candor. “Well, you know… best thing to do is put those babies in the hands a Jesus. What else you gonna do?” I pause from loading cereal boxes and Jiffy Mix, looking straight at her as she smiles and a gold tooth flashes. Eye contact is more of an achievement these days. You gotta work at it. Known worlds synch. Hands a Jesus.

I guess I’ll have to, because I’m certainly not going to get my hands on her. Ellie. Camp girl. Coming home Sunday and leaving Tuesday for a “move-in appointment” at George Mason. She and her brand new appendectomy moved out of here without any appointment first week of June. For the past 10 weeks she’s been quarantined with six other young adults working 9-4 daily, painting, repairing, cleaning, gardening, trail clearing, and tending a To-Do list miles long. Weekly they have composed and created and conducted online programs for fundraising and development as well as worship, fellowship, funny stuff, and community building, bringing “camp” to the hundreds kept away this summer. Not to mention, Go Ellie!, taking two college classes online, which she has just finished. By text she confesses to me that she is exhausted. I don’t have the heart to tell her what “camp” looks like at the Burk Motel. In the 36 hours she’ll be here I’m supposed to show her her “new room,” hang all the stuff back on the silver mist walls to her pleasing, review the college bill, review and discuss a meal plan (just in case), process her mail-in ballot, go over credit card statements, lay out the fall calendar and maybe get her to cut three heads of hair lest Bill, Will and me get mistaken for ZZ top. She last cut the guys before Easter (and I haven’t been yet!). Whatever will we do with our free time? Thirty six hours with a daughter I haven’t seen all summer. Like I’m saying here, boomerang girl, the fatted calf is breathing a big ol’ sigh of relief. I notice he’s giving the turkey the ol’ evil eye, though.

I began the quarantine painting furniture and it looks as though I will end it that way. Her furniture. Hurrying to finish a room transfer we initiated weeks ago when Will and Ellie traded rooms. In the great cycling of children through our home that actually began twenty-two years ago, Ellie is back where she began, in the little nursery room, the smallest in the house that was once painted yellow to match a darling paper border with bunnies having a picnic on it. I have often called it the happiest room in the house. Is everything in my world these weeks a direct portal into their babyhood? Maybe not, but this chest of drawers sure is. I didn’t know, girl or boy, so I painted it cherry red. An old oak dresser from the basement of my childhood home where my dad stored wire nuts and workshop tools so many years, stained and banged up with a broken leg. Before that it was bureau in a boys’ boarding school in the hills of Connecticut where he had gone to school. I’ve often thought that the grandfather who started this dresser’s journey through our family would be proud of these, his progeny, so at ease in academia. Will, be still my broken but somehow warmed heart, is taking Latin this fall. Id quod circumiret, circumveniat. What goes around…comes around.

It only dawned on me a week ago that Ellie is moving into an apartment. I’ve been so busy with dorm décor and freshman window dressing that I completely biffed. I came up with the great idea of grocery shopping for her and then realized–wait a minute! Apartment…kitchen….she has nothing to cook with! That’s no problem, my adrenaline and I are both in the “Just try me” phase of crisis management. Disaster energizes me, puts me in work-around mode. We can do this daughters. We can. You can. I know you can. Here, have a set of towels and a new toaster. After all, we are standing down a global pandemic and nothing, nothing will ever be the same again. Bring it on. Remember the Burk Emporium? We can turn cardboard box into castle while you’re still making a list of must haves. Plus, Ellie is super easy, simple, minimalist make-do sort without many needs at all. Girl does have taste, it’s just that unlike the rest of her cohort she isn’t usually hungry. With the exception of bed risers, almost nothing I bought for her came in multiples. One set of sheets, one towel, one pillow… What am I supposed to do with the other one, Mumma? Let it go. Good thing she wasn’t in charge of stocking the ark or we’d all be hosed. She is a minimalist of the highest order–part control thing, part pragmatist, part environmentalist, pure Ellie, and I want to affirm her. But it’s difficult, because like most college moms, my stockpiling for them is a tangible sign of the boundless love and pride I feel. (Mom! Seriously? Fruit snacks?? What am I going to do with 72 packages of fruit snacks??) By this point of the summer, on the cusp of “gone again” I want them both buried alive in supplies and gear, so they know. So they know.

So that’s what I’m doing at the grocery store with another in mind. Working out my worry on a cartful of Hamburger Helper. (Not really, that stuff is bad for you. Plus, Ellie has worked a camp kitchen for five years now–she knows how to cook!) Step aside, Mother Hubbard. A bare Covid-free kitchen waits somewhere on the third floor of Potomac Heights Student Apartments. I know she has a corner window. She showed it to Bill and me when we went up to move her out. In the time between then and now, she’s lost two flat-mates to online learning and has been relegated to a room of her own, a depletion and a downsizing that, strangely, is not reflected on the housing bill. Bummer. But we will all strap on a smile and move her in on Tuesday, come what may. The college has been cooking up stuff all summer–new signage, new protections and protocols. New procedures. A feast of change. Moving? Yes, everything. Like the tectonic plates under the crust of all we know and have taken for granted. Staying moved? I don’t know.

I do know enough from all the camp drop-offs and more recently college move-ins not to make their bed, not to stand in the wrong spot or touch the wrong item or move anything or make a single decision for this, their new nest, but heck, it’s Covid, we’re on borrowed time and compromised existence and nothing is the way it should be. On rare occasions they show me their little (I’m hungry, tired, ill, hurting, unhappy in a way you can actually help me) and on rarer occasions still, they allow me to be their big (I get it and I’m right here. My superpower is my ability to fix anything). Maybe for just a moment she’ll give me free reign in the kitchen to put these bagfuls away? From one (old) woman to another (young) one–I want your world to be marked with my love as it is made of His. Hands a Jesus.

That’s the thing about Covid. It makes other things make sense while it’s busy destroying the stuff right in front of you. It recalibrates relationships, resets priorities, single- handled and unsentimentally swipes away all you thought mattered and leaves a purified version of what does. Maybe that is what has waxed me so nostalgic these days: unlike my teens and young people whose hopes and dreams are like food to this ravaging disease, I have so much stuff you can’t take away. I have lifetimes you can’t touch. Maybe that’s why I’m still trying to feed them. In this room, the nursery with the sweet bunny picnic, I nursed my babies. I was their every three hours, then their every four, then their every six. Then I was their dinner only on busy school and social days, their every third meal. Now with the lovely grown people who come and go I bite the tongue that talks about living in a barn or a restaurant or a hotel, I bite that snarky retort right off so I can learn which next meal is mine. Will you be here for dinner? turning into When will you be here for dinner? turning into When will you be here…until this: the groceries I am buying will be her every three months. See you at Thanksgiving, my girl.

For her graduation two years ago, Ellie’s friends and family contributed to a recipe book. Not the most practical gift for an incoming freshman with a small cozy dorm room and full meal plan. She left behind much of the kitchen ware (two drawers of it I discover, while readying the dresser for painting.) But it sure makes sense now. Well, hello, apartment. Hello, empty kitchen. Now the mixing bows and dishtowels and silicone baking cups and immersion blender make wonderful, perfect sense. Thank you, life cycle. Thank you, Lord. Kairos. The recipes were written on one side of the page and on the other, words of wisdom, fond memories, funny anecdotes, prayers, and blessings for the graduate. Practically the four food groups for this time of unprecedented heartbreak. Endless swipes of his goodness. That little book is packed. Oh yes, and this time it probably will be.

I used to fuss about making their lunches. I wanted my people to make their own, to know their way around the kitchen, to feast on self reliance and I-did-it. I thought an eight-year-old should, indeed, add it to her morning routine. After all, if they could, they should. Part of Burk family boot camp with which I ran the house in their school days, this made sense to me as I needed one less thing to take care of in the mornings I was out the door before they were. As for their response, well, bit of a backfire here. Eating exclusively Cheeze-its for lunch (and nothing else) made sense to them. William, home from nursery school on one particular occasion, hands washed and puttering about the kitchen while I distractedly read the mail or unpacked groceries or answered a call, fixed his own lunch: plate from the cupboard piled high with fig newtons. “Oh son,” I laugh, passing by, “You can’t eat just fig newtons for lunch.” Can you picture him? Industrious, well-meaning little guy all of four years, climbing agreeably back down out of his chair to make his way over to the pantry. Next pass by, he has gone back and added some chips.

Then adolescence hit and young adulthood for the second gut punch. It is one of the few things they will still take from your hands on the way out the door and out the door and out the door and out the door again. Of all the things I have tried to give to the dooded-up and departing (hugs, questions, demands, advice, clothing suggestions, well wishes, ultimatums and umbrellas) only three will stick (keys, money, and lunch). Now, I don’t care, I want the job. I’m sorry I ever gave you grief. Whatchoo want–a BLT, breakfast sandwich, ham and cheese on lightly toasted wheat? Never mind all those snarky comments I made –I am a restaurant, I am, I am! Please, life. Give me back the security and the secret delight of knowing their midday pause will be what I packed.

They don’t let me pack ’em these days they don’t let me unpack. Although, that was pre-Covid. Going up to move Ellie out of a dorm room she had not darkened for 10 weeks, I was very aware of coming back to campus weeks after the semester got snuffed out, the classes long done and gone, the dorm room as she left it on that last Friday before Spring Break. When we opened the door out breathed a little sigh of sadness and waste. So much waste. As we worked (two hour deadline!) I tried to give her space in the little 12′ square room, taking on myself the mundane or the assigned — the closet, the walls. Maintenance had been allowed in to remove food from the refrigerators, pick up towels and clothing off the floor, and make sure the windows were shut. Other than that, her stuff was untouched. Look, daughter, right where you left it: paper assignment, weekend plans, studying with a friend, movie half-watched…. Life, right where you left it. Unlived. And we in our sadness and stupor began boxing her up. I must have pulled two hundred snapshots off her walls. There won’t be enough time at the move-in for me to tape them back up, and I know the instructions for provisional, gone-in-the-night living this fall won’t allow for it. So soup cans and cereal boxes it will be.

I’m trying to picture what Ellie will cook, and trying to load my cart with basic ingredients a college kid will think are exciting to prepare, but not off-putting and intimidating. Don’t want her resorting to Cheeze-its. Pasta, chili, soup. Comfort foods that nevertheless require at least one appliance to prepare. Things that will invariably be too much for one person to eat and thus must be shared. Baking mixes and lots of tea. It is energizing and comforting to me, to be stocking my daughter’s first kitchen. She is no longer a teenager, but man, you have to go a piece to get these kids to need you these days. I wish I’d shut up about the bologna so many years ago and just made their lunch. Okay fine, call me a helicopter. It used to be called “mom” and not regarded with such disdain that I am such an unchecked enabler. I just love taking care of them.

Grocery run done and headed home, I’m better now. It felt good to solve a problem, to check one just one item off the endless list that falls under “launch your kid to college” (x2) on life’s twisted, endless “to do” list this summer. Not really this, but I think it: over each can and box I place in the cart I pray: Let me not see you again. And you, and you. May you be cooked in normalcy and consumed in gladness. George Mason, all of them, have this little recipe for doom on their website: Do not bring more than can be moved out in an hour…. Well, okay you killjoy. But it will be a well-fed hour.

So let me correct that, Tina. I had college kids. A boomerang and a ghost. One moved out at the beginning of the summer for an opportunity so wonderful and life giving it makes my heart hurt and the other kind of leaked away her junior year, but has come around for the past three months, every time something awful happened and some things else died, went down, or got destroyed never to be again, so we could all, feast on that. Sharing pain. So much pain. Got some serious leftovers here. These were the times I noticed her most. Like an eclipse and I realize too late to contain the grief–she is still here.

The connection between me and this checker at the grocery store is instant and pure. Over our masks we make eye contact and mine are moist. She’s just one-upped me on the “tell ’em how you really feel instead of saying ‘I’m fine’.” She has invoked the only real hope in any of this mess. In one world, I am loading Hamburger Helper into her dorm kitchen only to haul it out in October (Eat quickly, Ellie. And eat well…) and in another world, I am stocking their kitchens, their dorms, their hearts with a source that feeds for life. Sure. I will put them in the “hands a Jesus” like you say, just as soon as I let go with both of mine.