On Home Education: A Writing Prompt

This week's Carry On Tuesday prompt was taken from the well-known lines of Robert Browning:

"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be...."

I didn't want to walk the obvious path with this prompt, although I have written about age in other poems; instead, I found myself thinking of my growing children, the eldest of whom is graduating from high school this year, the result of twelve years of home education. She spent one year in a private school (7th grade), and, despite making wonderful friends, she was clamoring long before the year was out to come home again for school. One younger brother towers over her while one matches her height; the youngest still remains boyish while his older two brothers race each other in gaining inches and manliness, their deep voices easily mistaken for their father's, even by me. And Elizabeth works, choosing colleges, on the periphery of our home school days. They grow--and part of me mourns for the little ones they were just a mere moment ago.

On Home Education

They scratch pencils
across pages,
filling blanks with
words birthed from graphite.

This ephemeral
hand-holding season
trickles to an end
as we tick off
days,
weeks,
months,
years.

Shooting rapidly
toward the ceiling,
they smile down upon me,
bending tall spines
to enwrap me
in adult-length arms.

Returning their embraces,
my heart reaches upward, too,
praying,
hoping,
wishing,
trusting
that the best is yet to be.

Copyright 2010 by Susanne Barrett