I have been thinking a lot about nests in the past few months, and I know it’s because my youngest son Mobolaji is about to leave the nest and fly off to begin his life as an adult. I have been preparing for the day he would leave for the past 3 years when my older daughter, Segilola left for college, giving me a taste of what it would be like. But how prepared am I?
I have provided a nest for him and his sister, and I remember expecting him 18 years ago and actually nesting. We had just moved to the US and I was shopping for a crib and making blankets, and drapes for the windows and I had enjoyed every moment of it as I had enjoyed it when I was going to have his sister. In the years since, the three of us have made a home together, but now he is on his way out to begin a life in which eventually he will be making his own home too.
This makes me think of making homes for our young.
Our first summer in our current home, a good sized snake that had made its home in the shrubs by the garage would come out with the sun to warm up. Whenever it heard us, it would slither back into a hole by the side of the house. I freaked out, my neighbor assured me that it probably was not poisonous and it had come to lay eggs there, but in Nigeria I had seen a man die from snakebite.
