This time of year used to be stressful around our house as the return of school loomed on the horizon like a rolling thunderhead. Summer meant no daily wrestling matches to get them out of bed, no early morning search for the shirt that “had’ to be worn that day and no battle over the breakfast menu. Seeing the back-to-school displays were like seeing the flashing blue light on your rear view mirror.
I think of this because the neighborhood stores around town are pushing their back-to-school sales, reminding me there is a club that I no longer belong to. We no longer think about whether file folders have holes so they can be put into notebooks, parking decals, book bags, etc. We’re college parents.
Granted, back-to-college expenses eclipse notebook paper and No. 2 pencils, but there is almost an aura around kids and college. Perhaps it’s the distance. The kids are hours away and I tend to romanticize things when I start missing the kids.
Or it could be spatial. Back to college means — for most — an adult-sized body is out of the house. One less person using hot water, scoring one of the primo carport slots or having an opinion on which movie gets rented.
Many maintain that a great deal of the college experience is to teach kids how to live away from home, but I would venture it is also a time for the parents to get used to them being gone.
When Zach graduated from Indiana University in May, many of our friends assumed he’d return to Atlanta. But his lease didn’t expire until this month and there was no need to come south. Still, our house will always be his home, no matter where in the world he hangs his hat.
The same goes for Amelia, who has already left for the University of South Carolina for her junior year. Once a Sandy Springsteen, always a Sandy Springsteen.
However, with classes, work, football weekends and her time committed with the proud sisters of the Epsilon Kappa Chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma this fall, it is even money that we may not see her until Thanksgiving — quite a change from the old days of the breakfast table grind, five days a week during the school year.
I’m not sure why, but I wish I could recall who took mustard and mayo on their sandwich, and who was just mayo. Now and again I come home on a September afternoon and look for a stray book bag dropped on the ottoman. And the weather application on my mobile phone is set to report conditions in Indiana and South Carolina — just in case.
If back to school brings multiple trips to the store for notebooks, pencils, glue sticks, poster board, gel pens, tape, etc., back to college brings a unique concoction of pride, freedom and a little melancholy.
Jim Osterman has lived in Sandy Springs since 1962.
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