Eight days went so fast, a blur, it’s almost as if he was never here.

Ben came home for the briefest Visit. We had not seen him, our grown up son, for more than a year.

I filled my fridge with foods I knew he’d love, foods he couldn’t have enjoyed where he was in his part of the world, I stocked shelves with Beer, that we might crack open cold each evening. 

We ate late leisurely breakfasts in a shaded spot of a sunny garden so that he could enjoy long green views. We drank those cold beers in the same spot where the valley spilled a million miles below us, spun with light and wreathed with dusk and dust, so that he might drink up his Africa.  We ate supper, the three of us, at a table properly laid, not to waste a single precious second of his company or conversation.

And I think now, everything that was ordinary in childhood became an occasion. 

I wrung every drop out of every minute. We walked miles, he and I, plodding our way through fields and up hills and step counting as we put the world to rights. There was so much to say, so much that is stripped of warmth over a screen, so much that becomes real when you can touch an arm or a face or a hand.  I wanted to pinch myself, ‘he’s home’.

And still I worry, did I make the most of it. Could I have milked more of his time in hours that I let slip through my fingers. 

Already he is gone so long it’s as if he was never here. Like a tide that runs across a beach and takes the sandcastle with it so that evidence of fun and games and laughter is gone, levelled to nothing.  You can’t believe you only built it the evening before.

Tomorrow there will be no breakfast in a sun drenched garden; tomorrow I will eat muesli out of a mug at my desk again.

And I wonder, did I dream this?

Except I know that I didn’t for everywhere I look, I can see gaps. And the hole in my heart, the one I fill with jam making, is dug deep and weeps.

So I know he was here. He was home. For a bit.