Above: Mom and Dad leaving for church on Easter Sunday 2016.

Like most jobs, my job entails duties of a certain cyclical nature. It holds a certain natural ebb and flow, so that – while it’s a stretch to say it is ever stress-free – periods of long hours and high stress alternate with periods of manageable work loads and lower stress.

For the last lingering weeks of this summer, I found myself suddenly feeling spread thin. It caught me by surprise. By Labor Day I found myself mentally and physically drained when I stumbled through my front door at the end of the day. At night I would sink into the mattress, but often could not rest my muscles until my mind finally slowed itself down. In the mornings – two alarm clocks notwithstanding – I would find my body reluctant to accept that I was indeed asking it to get up and propel itself through a shower, to the office, and through the demands of the day.

I needed a vacation. Being an introvert, I longed for nothing more than to go somewhere – preferably to a beach somewhere – alone and do nothing except sleep, eat, read, and go for long walks in nature, with no need to meet any demand or expectation of anyone.

But I found a different (and as it turns out, a better) option. Last week I took a few days off from work and drove home to stay a few days in Mississippi with my parents, who obligingly cleared their calendars and stocked their fridge so that I felt no obligation to go anywhere nor do anything – neither cook nor clean nor help fold a single dish towel – nor see anyone that I did not choose to go or do or see.

“Whatever privacy you need, you just take it,” Dad said.

“Sleep as long as you want, and do whatever you want,” Mom said.

And they were as good as their word. They went about their business, including me and happy to have me whenever I chose to go along, but leaving me to my own devices. So instead of being alone in a strange place, I found myself in familiar surroundings, with ample time to sleep, journal, pray, surf the Net, watch TV, read a couple of books, and – as always when I go back to Mississippi for any length of time – to reconnect with my childhood self.

In bed at night, I would listen to the barking of the little Shih Tzu in the fenced yard of the neighbors across the street, tied to a tree with its crate nearby. Deep into the night the little dog would yip and howl its loneliness, begging to be with its owners in the house. I would find myself carrying on an imaginary conversation with it in my head.

“You matter, little one,” I would send out to the dog mentally. “I wish I could take you home with me and play with you and love you and show you that you matter.”

“But this is my family,” I would imagine its reply. “My family that gets off the school bus, and that plays with me and feeds me. I appreciate your concern but I know them. I would rather stay with them. One day they will love me more.”

And eventually both the dog and I would drift off to sleep.

I would awaken in the mornings to the “Cheep! Cheep!” of a family of cardinals bustling in the bushes outside my bedroom window as emerging morning sunlight began to outline the edges of the window blinds. Mourning doves would trill and coo softly. From the other end of the house I would hear the shower running as Dad got ready for the day, and the clacking of Mom’s house slippers as she made her way to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.

During the day I would drive the streets of the little town and pass the house where my grandmother lived and my siblings and my cousins and I spent hours in our coming-of-age years, an era where innocence and optimism ruled our young lives in spite of social upheaval and racial unrest in parts of our country and a war in distant Asian jungles. I would feel stirrings of that same eternal optimism. I would remember that, because of my parents and brother and sister, my grandparents and cousins, I am, as the Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians, “rooted and grounded in love.”

I visited with my nephew, and my niece and her new husband and my brand new great-nephew. I visited with my first cousin Lisa and her husband, children and grandchildren. I enjoyed Bible study with my parents’ Bible study group and a sociable meal with the group that my parents meet for dinner most Friday nights.

Some vacations involve seeing new places and experiencing new things. Those vacations are a lot of fun and rejuvenating in their own way, but they aren’t always restful. I hope I can have a vacation like that sometime next year. But for now, this vacation worked for me. It offered just the right balance of rest, privacy, and interaction.

My parents – who happen to also be my best friends – plan to travel to Colorado soon to visit with my brother and my sister and her family.

(They have always been “have suitcase, will travel” people and they love road trips. They never fly when they can drive. For them, traveling truly is as much about the journey as it is the destination. I find it strange sometimes that I didn’t inherit their wanderlust. I like going to new places, and then if I like that place, I’ll just keep going back to it over and over again. There’s a place for the familiar, but I have to fight getting into a rut.)

Even though my visit with my parents is over and I’m back in my Tennessee home tonight, I will miss them while they’re on the road. I’ll worry a little and anxiously track their progress and visit Accuweather.com at least once an hour to check out the radar between Mississippi and Colorado. I’ll pray there’s no snow and ice on the roads in Rocky Mountain National Park, which I know they will visit while they’re out there.

Let’s face it. Even though I am about to wrap up my first half-century of circling the sun, even though I have a job with many responsibilities, and am responsible for my own finances and my own life, even though I haven’t lived closer than a two-hour drive away from my parents since 1983 – there is a part of me that remains a child, emotionally tied to my parents in a visceral, immutable way. And based on what I have observed of others, I’m not alone. We all grow up, but separation anxiety appears to be a permanent condition.

Today my parents left for church while I stayed behind to pack and get on the road for the drive home. Before they left, they hugged and kissed me. Mom packed food for me to bring back and slipped me a $20. As they started to back out of the driveway, Dad poked his head out and called out, “The angel of the Lord encamps round about those who fear Him, and He delivers them!”

Thus blessed in practical and spiritual ways, I took to the road. A cotton field bursting with big white bolls waved me goodbye, and the Natchez Trace Parkway took me over the Tennessee River, a figurative gateway from childhood to adulthood. But the child in me still feels the warm embrace of home.

Below: Cotton waiting for harvest; the Tennessee River flowing beneath the Natchez Trace Parkway bridge.