On Labor Day weekend, we took Emma to Bismarck for her first year at the University of Mary. The six-hour trek to Mary Hill is becoming more and more familiar: the wide open spaces, green hills and big skies, the sun and the wind…and that one stretch with the bugs splattering like rain on the windshield. The speed zone through Moorehead and Fargo. The bluffs by the James River.
It’s an easy six hour of driving, and it’s getting easier.
When we took Brendan for his first year, I likened the sensation to a taut wire from the back of my mind to him, constantly aware of his absence. When we took Gabe to NET, the feeling was a bit different: First he was just down the freeway in St. Paul, but then he was who-knows-where, living out of a van and crisscrossing state lines and time-zones.
Subsequent years it was better—easier—because they knew people. Faces unfamiliar to us spoke in smiling shorthand to them, and it was clear they were at home (a perception with its own bittersweetness).
But Emma is my daughter, my first girl-baby. And media and internet insist there is so much to be afraid of. And I was a freshman guy once.
Should I be worried?
On Monday, Lily, Jodi and I paraded by vehicle through the Big Woods Elementary School parking lot to cheer and be cheered by the teachers and staff. (In retrospect, Gabe should have joined; he did most to help her with distance learning these past few months.) It was a bittersweet end to the school year, capped by a tear-jerking video from Mrs. Skon to all her students later in the week. We were all blessed to have her as a teacher through these challenges—Lily most of all. 
Archangel Stomp 