Alone.

What does that mean in my life at this point? I hardly know. It can be safely said that I am almost never alone. Two of my children – even though they are grown – still live with me and they are here part of every day. Then there’s my husband who is with me wherever I might be almost all the rest of the time. His work is slow to nonexistent at the moment so he is with me even more than he used to be, which was still fairly often. I work at home and he’s at home and works here too on other projects besides his main income-producing one, so, alas, we are together a lot. That is unless he’s in Texas working there and the kids are gone and then I am alone except when I’m seeing students, who come for 4 to 6 hours five days a week.

Alone if you don’t count my dog, Cordelia, who is more company than most people and requires a fair amount of attention in terms of petting. Then there are William and Charlie, our two cats, who spend most of the time they aren’t killing mice back in Liz’s room, where they are always hopeful that I’ll come in and pet them without public enemy number one, aka Cordelia, with me. So, alone is not a major part of my life, at least not now. In fact, for the past 2 mornings, I’ve gotten up at 4 am to be with my youngest daughter as we painstakingly worked on a 14 page research paper for her first English class at UCLA, and I might mention, this paper is difficult. Alas, no alone time there.

But Rachael is moving out to her very own apartment in a week and Liz is literally gone 16 hours a day at law school and the law library, and Ray will probably start spending even more time in Texas since work here is looking iffy, so I may very well get a good chance to see what alone feels like. That is alone in reference to human beings.

I wouldn’t mind seeing what that feels like. I have a little more togetherness than I would like on any given day. As much as I love people, alone looks alluring at the moment.

I expect there will come a day when I will look back on all this together time and see how lucky I was to have it. And I even now recognize that I am fortunate to have so much time with my family, but…a little alone time would still suit me just fine. Yes, I’d say, just fine.