Imminently the alumium alloy tube will lock him in to hurtle at 36,000 feet above sea level and 5 hour across the country. Alone. With his sister onboard and without a parent in the random hands of streams of professional TSA workers, gate checkers, pilots and air traffic controllers.

I’m reading the post apocalytic novel Station Eleven and a group of 100 pandemic survivors are holed up at an airport raiding evacuated store fronts and begining to build a Day 100 Museum of Civilization. In this primitive dystopian world of survivors and relics the Museum features iphones, stilleto heels, credit cards. It makes me wonder what I would place into the Museum if all cushions of normal existence as we know it in 2016 had evaporated.

Perhaps photographs. Perhaps a coveted collection of signed books. Perhaps a piece of jewelry stripped from my body.

As I send my boy into independance I place another item in the Museum, this one not of the material world. This item is an acknowledgment.

The acknowledgment that primal mothering instincts to protect our children have kept the human race breathing, emerging and surviving. Worms of human protection burrowed so deep, cooked into the collective soup of survival.