The Enchanted Forest

Our family of six was all in one place this weekend, which is quite a feat as we live on two continents and in three countries. We were celebrating the graduation of our daughter from high school (with High Honors!), which should be celebrated, of course. And we did. But it was definitely bitter-sweet.

She and her sister began school in this place 12 years ago. It was not only a school, though; it was a home. They boarded there in a 400-year-old German house, with 10-15 other young kids, a couple of single young women and a married couple who we came to think of as almost perfect. It was away from our home, but otherwise idyllic in many ways.

Our family experience there evolved from the girls in Liel to their younger brother joining them, to moving on to a girls' high school dorm and their brother to other places, back home, back to school. There were certainly bears and wolves in that enchanted forest - grief, guilt, temporary goodbyes and forever partings, struggles to accept the realities of living in community - for the kids and for us.

Those wounds became part of us all just as the magical joys have, of picnics and castle-explores, forts in the woods, life in a loving, 20-member family, being part of a big world - and in fact several big worlds. There is no way to give an idea of the richness that our past twelve years in the Black Forest region has added to us. And obviously each of us on our own has to come to terms with what we experienced, the wolves and the fairies, and grapple with leaving it all behind.


So it was a quiet car on the way back to France this weekend. One of us was flying back to the States as the rest headed to our now-home for three weeks before starting a new home. We will be all on one continent now. Three states, at least for a while, but in a place where we can drive to see each other.

There are really good things coming. There are hard things coming. And we are figuring out what we bring with us to the next place, what has become a permanent part of us, as we say goodbye.