I've just sent my youngest(!) baby(!) off to school. Junior year abroad. Bittersweet airport farewell. Two suitcases: 100 lbs of checked luggage for a year, and everything else she could possibly stuff into carryon without getting busted by the airline luggage police. A road to adventure. Meiji Gakuin University. Tokyo. Japan. Her dormitory just so happens to be in the general location of our old neighborhood. Our old neighborhood when we were an American ex-pat family living in Japan...nearly 20 years ago. What are the odds of that. I cannot help but wonder on the weirdness/dramatic irony (if those are the right terms) of how she ended up back in Japan... She was just a bald little babe-in-arms when we arrived in Japan and now that road has circled back. She first spoke toddler Japanese and now she is in Japan to study the language for real. Her road is open and stretched out ahead of her.
This photo is one of streets in our neighborhood. Taken a few days before we left Tokyo to return to the US....another bittersweet transition. I had given the boys a camera to go out and snap pictures of all the familiar and ordinary sites in the neighborhood. The painted characters in the street spell out ToMaRe or STOP. How often have we ever wished we could stop time and savor the moment?
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