Ready?

A month into this great experiment, I still have people calling to ask, "How's it going?"
"What?" I ask in limited dullness.
"The whole empty nest thing," and they wait for me to go on.
"It's okay."
And that's about it. I can't give them a lot of details. Some days are better than others and since it's uncharted territory I don't really know what to expect. Because my wife and I have continued to act as socially responsible members of polite society, I expect that it will appear that all is normal and the tilt of the axis of the earth maintains its roughly twenty-three degrees off center and that whole spinning on its axis thing continues more or less unabated.
But it's my wife's insistence that she wishes that things would go back to normal that makes me wonder. This is the woman who picked a house for us to live in and was the driving force in getting us moved in with freshly painted walls and completed paperwork, all while she was a precarious nine months pregnant. The first night we slept in our new bedroom, with mostly unpacked boxes in the living room and a son still waiting to be born, she laid awake, staring at the new white paint on our ceiling. "Can we go home now?" she asked.
That was fun. We all learned a lot and we are glad to know that in a pinch we can gather up our belongings and push them into a truck and with the help of a half dozen of our closest friends and family we can relocate across town. In a pinch. But do we really have to stay? Can't we just push the reset button and wait until we really need to move?
There aren't a lot of reset buttons in life. I know. I've looked. That night in our new house, I knew exactly how my wife felt. The beginning of another chapter in our great adventure felt like something for which I was never prepared. Having a few practice runs might have given me more security in the choices we had made, but that wasn't really practicable. We plunged on into the void. Into the mystic. The late nights and early mornings and birthday parties and pets and friends and home improvement projects that have gone on since then never really allowed me to feel that sense of a solid earth beneath my feet. It was always moving. Or maybe that was us.
A few nights ago, my wife pulled out our video collection, now cleverly transferred to a series of DVDs, and she watched a family in its primordial state grow into what we are now. We were all so much thinner, younger, smaller, happier than we might have remembered without the aid of audio visual cues. It made a great story. A story that continues now, in places and ways that are not as well documented but every bit as exciting. I look forward to having a chance to review this next chapter. When I'm older. When I'm ready.