It has come to my attention that, once Nora departs for college, I will gain some closet space.

A positive development.

Not that I won’t miss her, not that life isn’t shifting so much for our entire family. The intensity of emotion right now, spilling out during moments of rare quiet (a solo car ride from one celebratory event to the next, these seniors committed to having as much fun as possible with one another while simultaneously being ready to go; spotting this year’s middle schoolers waiting for the bus on the corner, like my youngest - our elementary school days now over - will wait next year…do they ever stop growing up, even for a second?) is so indelible that you know its impact right as it’s happening.

But, as far as practical matters are concerned, come summer’s end, a member of our household will be moving out (as much as college students ever really do) and I can use her closets for things like bulky sweaters. I have been thinking about this: gaining space. Both physically and figuratively.

The other night my three children - side by side - were trying to sing in harmony at the kitchen counter, laughing when it went awry, and I had to force myself not to ruin the moment by telling them to remember these times forever.

Like hiking up and down a mountain, is how this feels. For all these years our household kept growing - the number of people and then the people themselves - and now, after another buoyant summer, it’s going to get smaller.

Which brings me to the closet space. Sure, two kids at home is still plenty of kids. But (caveats aside, because I do understand Nora will be back, and that having a child in college is certainly not the end of parenting them) as my children are approaching what’s next, I’m thinking about how I want to do the same.

J and I talk about vacations we will take with Aidy when it’s just the three of us someday. We talk about retirement (good grief). The flip side of these heady feelings surrounding life’s emotional milestones are the giddy ones surrounding new opportunities.

Our family has been playing the song “Shakedown Street” by the Grateful Dead on repeat after hearing an excellent rendition performed by students at one of the many arts school concerts we attended this year. This got me thinking about the way I used to listen to music (wholeheartedly, without being able to tear myself away) verses the way I listen to it now (frantically as if there’s never enough time to get a full song in).

How this jibes with the way our attention spans behave overall these days and how I’ve been trying to resist the multitasking lifestyle modernity wants us to be living, resisting the narrative that time is in short supply, out of our control.

Not in a lofty way! This concentration-stealing, immediacy-required living…it just doesn’t feel good. Nora and I discuss throwing our phones away. We’re all talk, but what can we do that’s real, we ask.

So I said to J and Gabe: what if I listened to every live rendition ever recorded of “Shakedown Street” as a summer goal. They told me that was a “weird” idea for someone like me, and I had to remind them that not only was I once very into the Dead, but I had a hemp necklace, you guys.

They were unmoved, and I decided that while I will continue to embrace my former roots, perhaps there is a better music-focused goal that doesn’t include listening to the same song over and over.

That I will get glasses with progressive lenses so my nighttime reading does not require a carefully placed one million watt bulb by my bedside (so I am more prone to doing it). Go for regular post-dinner walks with friends or family members willing to come along and claim the space that exists in between all the rest. Move the sweaters, stand in my closet and marvel at how rethinking how you approach your shelves and your hours makes such a notable difference.

Summer goals 2026:

Listen to 20 full albums from start to finish (recommendations welcome!)
Read poetry
Walk around the track at the high school, preferably at dusk when the lights turn on
Ease back into learning Italian
Visit yet unvisited spots on Yale’s campus
Get new glasses
Swim whenever there is an opportunity (2025 goal)
Make a “to be read” pile by the bedside table
Yoga once a week
Finish Ulysses
Attend the wedding of a very old friend
Long talks by and in the pool
Go to cardio tennis!
Make future weekend getaway plans
Try at least 10 new recipes
Dinner by the beach with Aidy
Get comfortable making a proper Negroni; practice on friends
Plant flowers, vegetables and otherwise spend time working on our front and back yards
Clear out closets and other storage spaces with the aim of knowing where everything is once school starts this fall
Tour the Glass House in New Canaan (2023 goal)
Get iced coffees, make life plans
Post-ocean-jump dock sunbathing
Family road trip…
..to take my daughter to college

I’ve been telling people recently that I’m having a false sense of finality. Recently, I was walking with Nora through the chaos of a home track meet at her and Gabe’s high school, where we’d come to see him run the mile (side note that he missed the start that day due to not being able to find a jersey; ran the event at his next meet in his green and yellow Steely Dan t-shirt - they happen to be the colors of his school; and was finally given a proper jersey at practice recently that he deemed, “very tight”…this how track is going, but he’s fast enough, just a freshman, and his coaches are incredibly generous of spirit with, it seems, a good sense of humor).

As we were leaving, worried as we walked too close to the shot put pit, I said something about these being the last days of all this! High school! And Nora, ever so wise, ever so graceful, reminded me of my other two children, and the fact that these are by no means my last days as a parent at this high school, which, to be clear, was what I meant; her experience ending, sure, but also mine.

Which it is decidedly not. Aidy, our third child, is experiencing a milestone year, too; she’s moving on from our beloved elementary school just down the road (Maisie and I resolutely walk her there nearly every morning and on one such walk this week, I realized suddenly, tragically, that soon enough we will encounter that final milestone, as well - “last walk to elementary school” - and the dog will not know, I suppose, although I sense, somehow that she will) and heads to middle school in the fall. But she will still be in this particular school system for - let me calculate - ever. Or, in more realistic terms, the next six years.

So, as Nora suggested in more compassionate language: calm down.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll look back on this particular era of my parenting and writing and think that I overdid it on the sentimentality vibes. Objectively, yes, that is what is happening. But it is so hard to think or write about anything else. It’s very difficult not to get all caught up in the windfall of these emotions and I keep thinking to myself, “Cara, you need to meditate. Mindfulness is the thing that reminds you that feelings are just feelings and you don’t have to fully weather the storm each time one arises. Because they so often arise.” I really should be meditating.

However, as I’ve mentioned in some of my recent posts, I think that this is an ok time for reveling (even the tearful kind) because there aren’t that many times in life like this. Where it feels like it’s impossible to go too far, as long as you aren’t going too far in the wrong direction. Not putting too many expectations on the children, on the situation itself. Just letting your own emotional upheaval play out as required. It’s tough to keep that balance - not to get clingy or try too hard to find the right words and start pontificating. I mean, look at all these words. Perhaps it’s too late for that.

One symptom of all this nostalgia-in-the-making is that I’ve been thinking about my own teenage years quite a bit and last night was remembering how much I loved all the American transcendentalist writers, in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson. I searched for one poem in particular (very soothing considering the current overwrought state of affairs, very soothing always) and wrote it on post it notes which I placed on the refrigerator.

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

“Write it!” Like my dad used to say whenever I mentioned anything he thought would make a good story, and he thought nearly everything would (so do I, apparently!)

I think what I’m getting at in this current swirl of words is related to how I worry - with all these attempts to ensure my feelings meet but don’t exceed the moment - that I won’t maintain the proper distance needed to be a good parent. Making sure my own fragile psyche doesn’t mind-mild into theirs. This feeling…of having a first child get ready to leave home…that’s mine, and this one…of soaking up these final walks to the elementary school…that’s mine, too. But the real doing, the actual moving on…that’s theirs. And I don’t think they’re as rattled by it as I am. They don’t seem rattled by their own big milestones at all. As it should be.

Last night, though, Aidy - after lying on the floor in Nora’s room, listening to Taylor Swift songs with her big sister - retreated to her bed where she started wholeheartedly crying. She told me that she doesn’t want Nora to go, and about how she’s never going to see her again for four years (I corrected this assessment). I got in bed with her and realized I didn’t know how to do this right. To be the parent in this situation…to not be a fellow bereft, soon-to-be-abandoned family member. Unclear where one of us started and the other began.

But I didn’t need to know. The comfort, the empathy - I hope - that was parenting enough (“you have done what you could/tomorrow is a new day”). Sometimes you arrive with sufficient reserves to simply be present. “It would be so nice,” I told Aidy, “if everything stayed the same. But that’s what makes life good. That it doesn’t.”

I said it, trying not to cry myself. I repeated it, so that I would know it, too.