There's a different particular and bittersweet ache to loving people across multiple time zones.
My oldest granddaughter is leaving New York the city that gave her ambition a place to run, for California, the state that gave her breath. He employer is sending her home, in a way, though home for her was never really one fixed point on a map. She was born under those western skies, and now she returns to them, not as the infant she was, but as a woman with a career and a future the state seems eager to claim back.
I should be only glad. And I am. But gladness has a shadow, and mine is shaped in broken hearts lined with distance.
My grandchildren are already scattered, most of them anchored in Los Angeles, my only grandson holding down Dallas like a lone star of his own. Now my oldest joins the constellation, another point of light too far from my porch light to see on an ordinary evening.
There's no rule that says love has to live in the same zip code. I know this. I've watched enough of life to know that presence isn't always about proximity, that a phone call at the right moment, a plane ticket held in reserve, a standing Sunday video call, can hold a family together as surely as a shared street ever did.
Still. I miss the version of this family where I could just drive to see them. Where a grandchild's laugh wasn't something I had to schedule.
They are out there now, all of them, scattered like stars across a country that somehow feels both smaller and impossibly vast. And like stars, they are no less mine for being far away, only harder, some nights, to reach.