Today Sydney is moving back out of the house into an apartment near the UNF campus in Jacksonville where she currently goes to college. This is actually the second time she has moved out for college; the first time to a dorm at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia where she went for one semester in the Fall of 2021. When you got sick, she felt strongly about coming home to be here with us and to help share the load of taking you to your chemotherapy treatments and appointments, as well as your lessons with your students. So, after she finished that Fall semester at Mercer, she moved back home and took some time off from college. I honestly don’t know what we would have done without her during the last year and a half or so!
Now, after a couple of semesters of taking part time online classes and commuting to UNF, it’s time for her to get back into the full swing of her college experience. So today, for the second time, we will load up her things and move her in to new temporary “college home”, although this time it’s only an hour away instead of almost four!
You would have loved physically taking her shopping to pick out for things for her apartment. With me, unfortunately, she gets the convenience of Amazon shopping. But, she has been blessed with generous gifts of used furniture and useful household items and gift cards from our church family and friends. Her first apartment will be much better appointed than mine was all those years ago!
You would be proud of Sydney for working over the summer to earn her own money to pay for her personal expenses. She has been diligent at helping out (without having to be asked) around the house and farm and she has become quite the cook making delicious meals, desserts, and even Gran Hall bread! She even wants to take some Gran Hall bread starter with her to feed and bake with in her apartment!
I will miss her sweet, gentle, loving spirit here (and the help with chores), but I think it is time for her to get back to her “college experience” which includes living away from home (even if only an hour away). So after today, it will officially just be me and Grammy here with the dogs, cats, horses, and gopher tortoises. However, with Sydney, we will have the best of two worlds in that she will have her own separate place, but she will be close enough to come home regularly, if for no other reason than to throw the ball for her beloved Leo.
You’ve been gone now for almost eight months. Sydney moving out is yet another one of those milestones that reminds us of the immutable fact that time and life do in fact move on. But, while the presence or absence of an individual life such as yours doesn’t alter the turning of the earth on its axis, or the rising and setting of the sun, we are forever touched and changed by the intersection of you with our lives; and we carry that forward with every breath, every step, every day, and every milestone without you.
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