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Loving Folk at a Distance

I went to university four hours away from my birth family by car. I spoke to my parents regularly (twice a week) and visited for holidays and summers, and did not feel very isolated from them, even when I went to graduate school and stopped going home for summers.

While in graduate school I met my wife and we became engaged very shortly before she left the state for graduate school while I continued with my studies an air-flight away. We were engaged for roughly two and a half years, visiting monthly. Money was tight and we did late-night phone calls when the costs were lower and wrote long letters as well.

We married and had two children. Decades later they went off to university, one by one. By this point phone call expenses did not depend on the hour of day and we were better off financially. We stayed in touch.

With the advent of COVID we all became used to video-chatting for work. When my son worked gigs in other states we stayed in touch that way and still do now that he has a full-time job two time zones away. 

Our daughter is about to move out of state, for at least a few months. She already lives forty minutes away by car, and so while we see her in person regularly we video-chat on the weeks we don't.

Video chats scratch one itch; a lovely complement is that our children are frequent texters and my wife and I have been drawn into frequent group text chains.

We are feeling a latter-version of the empty nest as our daughter moves to six hours away by car instead of forty minutes. I do however feel profound gratitude that

1) Our kids still seem to like us. We know that they love us but liking is not always a given in families.

2) We are affluent enough and technologically supported enough to make communication a matter of choice and scheduling rather than sporadic. I have fond memories of exchanging long letters with my wife-to-be from different parts of the east coast, but I would not trade that for the regular contact I have with our kids.

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