Without

My heart left Iola this weekend.
My two boys went to spend the summer in Montana with their dad.
Jacob was eager for the change, counting down the days since school got out ‘til he could see his friends, play board games left behind, swim rivers thick with speckled trout, with currents cold and deadly.
Owen saw some value here, saying, “I like Kansas.”
Knowing he’ll return, he left behind his Legos, his Bionicles, his box of art supplies — and a score of drawings to keep me company.
“I’ll miss you,” I said as I hugged him goodbye.
“You have my pictures to look at,” he diplomatically replied.
Tonight, I’ll rearrange the corkboard where the boys’ drawings hang, take down those that look like winter and put up the colorful new ones, where everyone is smiling. Raindrops grin as they fall from jagged clouds, sunbeams smile on bright-toothed flowers. All the pictures are happy. And he’s right: they’ll keep me company, because I’ll see him whenever I look their way.
I know this summer will be good for them. After too many years of my acting as both mother and father, we’ll all get a break. And the boys will wrestle with a man they love.
They’ll shop the farmer’s market, where local organic produce abounds. Where Lori the Lavender Lady, who grows only that scented herb, will spritz them with fragrant water as they stop to say hello. Where breads like cheese and onion, caramel apple and rustic pan Italia have replaced the plate-sized cinnamon rolls that once were a Saturday staple.
They will walk trails through mountain cedar and lemon-scented wild ginger. Soak in hot springs tucked in river bends, watched by mama moose.
They’ll listen to homegrown music at one of many summer festivals. Eat tacos from a roadside stand and giant rainbow sno-cones topped with outlandish paper umbrellas.
Owen will roll down “the rolling hill,” a tall green berm above the Clark Fork River. Below him, kayakers will play in a standing wave, constructed in the river for their sport.

They left with stories to tell their friends, of birds as red as tongues of fire, as blue as drops of sky.
They left having lived through their first tornado warning, where at 2 p.m. the sky went dark. Winds whipped and the house was pelted with hail like rocks on a clay bowl. We cleared an interior closet and wondered at the illogic of houses with no basements in a tornado-prone zone and listened as sirens wailed through a brightening sky.
They left having seen fireflies, a bug known only in fables in the cold, arid west.
The night before they left we down near the river, clean spaghetti sauce jar in hand, to try to catch the flying lights. To his disappointment, I wouldn’t let Owen run into the sodden fields the fireflies seemed to prefer. I knew the fields were full of poison ivy, a plant I have a terrific allergy to. I don’t know if the boys are so afflicted: I’ve kept them from the stuff. I didn’t think his last night was the one to find out if he is susceptible.
And now he’s off, back to a place where it doesn’t matter. In 23 years there, I saw the plant once. As with the fireflies, Montana is too dry for it to grow.
My heart left Iola; I am left with a house of silence.
For all my nagging to be quiet when I’m tired, or stop arguing and pick up toys, the solitude of a house full of the boys’ things, but without them, is almost too much too bear.
It seems an impossibly large hollow they left behind. When they left, they unwittingly took a huge chunk of my spirit.
In 30 days, I’ll go and fetch it back.