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THE GOLDEN ACHE

Well, Keech left for Seattle just a couple of hours ago, after about 2 months here, and I miss him already. Already all the tasks yet to be done-- the new stone steps, the cedar thinning, the bamboo cutting, the log hauling-- seem to loom so much larger, be so much more daunting, without him. And will be lonelier to do, than when we could banter as we worked, making the work go faster as the sweat fell, seeming to be easier as we took on the task together. And now there is an intense ache where he was, where he would have been in all these things.

I never used to feel this way after farewells, even long ones, maybe even forever ones, but I guess when you're young you don't yet have the life-time required to understand what farewells deeply mean, how hard they can fall on the long-lived heart.

How blithely I left home myself at age 18 to enter the military, never to return again as the naive teenager I'd been, being then even more blithely unaware of the pain my mother was no doubt feeling as I went off into my life, off into the intense experiences that dimmed any pain of departure. You have to be young to get away so easy with goodbye. But it all catches up with you, and now I'm feeling to the heart what my mother must have felt, what all doting parents must feel, that golden ache it is to love someone who must, in the nature of things, go away into their own far reaches of life.