College move-in day feels like a hurricane

[vivfox]

August 30, 2008

The stress levels were already elevated when we got in the car.

Our departure followed a hectic week dealing with Tropical Storm Fay's thrills — driving in high winds across a causeway in a car that weighs about 4 pounds, watching floodwaters inch up the lawn.

I felt guilty sympathy for those hauling sodden carpet and sheet rock and ruined furniture to the curb.

This time, we'd been spared, nothing worse than doors swollen shut from humidity and a plague of flying bugs in the house.

Still, the angst mounted.

Another storm was already on the radar, Gustav, spiraling merrily northwest from the Dominican Republic. His projection cone at that point wide enough to swallow the state of Florida.

It was too familiar — another high-hurricane season scenario of back-to-back storms.

In 2004, it was Frances and Jeanne.

Both forced evacuations from the barrier islands and forever altered the local perception that "hurricanes just don't hit here."

So I am perhaps to be forgiven for being a nervous wreck as I, my husband and our youngest kid piled into the car recently with lamps, a TV, pillows and assorted junk to go help the two older kids settle in new digs near UCF.

And for compulsively hissing "Slow down! Slow down!" as the 15-year-old drove us through deluges and Orlando traffic snarls that conjured memories of hours trapped in a pre-Frances bumper-to-bumper turnpike exodus out of that storm's bull's-eye with millions of other fleeing Floridians.

Adding to the fun was the knowledge the second college kid had already left the building and probably wouldn't be coming back for any lengthy refresher courses in being our kid soon.

Already the house rang hollow. As if some small death had occurred.

I had only to walk back to his empty room to feel the waterworks building in the tear ducts — yet another flood threatening.

The clincher came later that day when we were headed to lunch, all stuffed in the car and trying to maneuver the crowded parking lot of the college-housing complex.

Dozens of families stumbled around bewildered, hoisting the physical and emotional gear of move-in day on their shoulders.

Just then, this old Stevie Nicks song came on the radio.

You remember Stevie Nicks. She was hot back when boomers were moving into dorms and making their parents feel old and beside the point.

"I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my life around you," Nicks wailed. "But time makes you bolder, children get older. I'm getting older too."

OK, so forget that the song is actually a romantic ballad about what seems to be a disastrous relationship, and not a dirge about the challenges of the empty nest.

And that the lyrics aren't exactly immortal prose.

They were enough to nudge open the spigots anyway.

And make the guys in the car feel sheepish.

They laughed when I said someone must have programmed that particular song to play that particular morning when all the moms were in high cry gear.

"Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?"

The next day, back at home, I checked for the name of the song on the Internet.

"Landslide."

Another wet natural disaster.

For tropical storms and parents of college freshman, this is the season.

http://www.dailypress.com/features/d...,2458288.story