Stewart's last Saturday clerking at the store

One week from today my last son will leave home for college.  For the first time in 29 years there will be no children in this house.  Naturally inside me there is confusion about whether I’m bereft or ecstatic.  I’m ecstatic, literally, in the sense that I consider and anticipate what spiritual truths will come to fill me.  When the presence of all the boys I’ve loved with all my heart is removed what will take their places?   Instead of them I will invite “the universe” as people call it these days, to fill that empty space with something powerful.

It’s 4 a.m and I can’t sleep because lying in my bed I’m beginning to make this piece of work– a chronicle of the last week of the last child in the house.  I’m going to photograph the ordinary bits of life, the movements through these days.  And I’m going to write about them.  And that will be, I believe, the most  deeply felt piece of art I have made in a long time.  What is art other than a mirror, a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope?  Beyond this week  I will begin another piece– the pulling together and imagining of the rest of my life.

Stewart's been working in the fields and behind the counter of the Bradford Store since he was 14.