"Rituals are when we wish to repeat...

...what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur."

This is from a piece in the Times today, "The Day He Knew Would Come":

The doors to their bedrooms are always shut, their bathroom always empty. On weekends, when you wake up in the morning, the kitchen is as clean as you left it last night. No one touched anything; no one stumbled in after partying till the wee hours to heat up leftovers, or cook a frozen pizza, or leave a mess on the counter while improvising a sandwich. The boys are away now.

Two decades ago there were two of us in our Upper West Side home. Then we were many. Now, we’re back to two again.
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E-mail and cellphones kept my eldest son, in college, present at all times. And there were his twin brothers who still lived at home and would continue to do so for two more years, shielding me from his absence. We removed one leaf from the dining table, my eldest’s dirty running shoes disappeared from our hallway, and his bedroom door remained shut, for days sometimes. Life had become quiet. Everyone had space. In the morning, on his way to class in Chicago, he always managed to call. A new ritual had sprung.

Then this past September, the twins left as well. Suddenly a half gallon of milk lasts eight days, not just one. We don’t buy sausages or peanut butter or stock all manner of cereals that have more sugar than wheat. There is no one to rush home and cook for, or edit college applications for, or worry about when they’re not back past 3 a.m. No sorting though dirty socks, no mediating the endless bickering about who owns which shirt, no setting my alarm clock to ungodly hours because someone can’t hear his alarm clock in the morning, no making sure they have 12 No. 2 pencils, and not just two.

All things slow down to what their pace had been two decades earlier. My wife and I are rediscovering things we didn’t even know we missed. We can stay out as long as we wish, go away on weekends, travel abroad, have people over on Sunday night, even go to the movies when we feel like it, and never again worry about doing laundry after midnight because the boys refuse to wear the same jeans two days in a row. The gates are thrown open, the war is over, we’re liberated.
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Just as the boys came and went this Christmas, this is how it always is and has been: things come and then they go, and however we bicker with time and put all manner of bulwarks to stop it from doing the one thing it knows, the best thing is learning how to give thanks for what we have. And at Christmas I was thankful; their bedroom doors were open again. But I knew, even as I welcomed the flurry of bags and boxes and hugs and yelps, that a small, sly corner of my mind was already dreading and rehearsing that morning in January when they’d all head back to the airport.