I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus since the Slice of Life Challenge. My writing mojo, while primed after March, just fizzled with the onslaught of school and family, with the difficulties that each offer. We’ll try to return to the Tuesday and Friday mode of writing. 🙂

As my youngest daughter begins the stretch run for her high school career, it’s easy for me to say what I’ll miss.

Yes, I’ll miss her swimming. I’m a basketball junkie, but after 5 years of swim meets, I can honestly say I’ll miss that competition. Not that either of my daughters were state swimmers, but the teams they swam with were so good for them. Between swimming and cross country, junk sports in so many people’s minds, they found friends for life.

Yes, I’ll miss having a pipeline of information about former students. I won’t lie, as our whole grade sharing and now consolidation are just about finished, I miss the school my daughters grew up with. I miss the close knit community. I miss the bars and lemonade after choir and band concerts. But not having the high school here, that kills me. Once they leave 8th grade, they are gone, almost like a graduation as we just don’t see them anymore. And now, it will be worse because we don’t have to go to the high school any more. If we don’t have to go to music concerts, band concerts, sporting events, will we? Time will tell.

But I’ll miss the music most of all. My oldest daughter graduated two years ago, but not before she sang, “Hope is a Thing with Feathers“, with a quartet and just blew us away. My wife and I cried at this, and it was funny because our daughter came up to us later asking, “Were you crying?” Yes, dear, good music does that to you.

Next, our youngest. Last year she sang the song, “Music in my Mother’s House,” and once again, tears. Have a listen if you’d like, but the lyrics and they harmonies are just so good.

And this year. Ugh. So much emotion this year with the passing our choir director, the director who encourage both of our daughters to sing in elementary and was their freshmen and sophomore choir director. This year, during our director’s funeral, she’d picked out a song, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” and a former student sang the solo part. It’s a powerful, emotional song, but a song of hope, on that brought tears to many people that day. Well, on our Washington DC trip, my daughter took the roll of soloist, and this is that song in the Washington National Cathedral. The first time she sang it, a couple of days previous, I’m not sure how many dry eyes there were in the chaperones. She nailed it, singing with courage and passion, just like Janet would have liked. And a couple of Saturdays ago, was our school’s small group ensemble contest, and my daughter sang “The Mermaid Song” and “Come Unto Him” from Handel’s Messiah. Not so much tears as just being proud of how mature her voice has become (leaving snarky comments about maturity out). 🙂

I will miss the singing from both of my daughters around the house. We’d make fun of them “caterwauling” around, but it will be a major adjustment to not have that music in our lives. We travel to Ames to listen one daughter and we’ll travel to Iowa City to listen to the other, but that’s a bit far. Who knows what we’ll do, but it will be an adventure.

I wouldn’t expect anything less.