Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

Last Thursday I flew home from Walt Disney World. It was my 21st trip. My first trip to Disney was in 1988. My parents, my brother, and I took the sleeper train from the Northeast to Florida. At the time, there were only two parks open: Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Six years later, when I graduated from high school, my parents asked what kind of graduation trip I wanted to take. We weren’t a family that traveled much, but they wanted to do something special, and I said I wanted to go back to Disney World.

So we did.

A few years later, my Nana took the entire family, including my uncle and my boyfriend (now my husband) to a much improved Disney World. It was a dream come true for her, a girl who had grown up in poverty. Splashing the wave pool at Typhoon Lagoon made her smile like a child. In that moment, Disney stopped being just a vacation and became part of our family history.

When my Nana passed, my mom decided to honor her by becoming a Disney Vacation Club member. It was my mom’s dream to take her grandchildren someday, just as my Nana had taken us. When my children were born, Disney became part of their childhood. Our biennial trips were something bigger than rides and fireworks displays. They represented family, memories, and time together, and each trip we would toast “Nana” for starting a family tradition. As my twins reached high school graduation age, we all quietly acknowledged that 2023 was probably the “last big family trip.” Except it apparently wasn’t.

Because last week, I made my 21st trip, and my kids and mom were there alongside me.

After traversing the World Showcase at Epcot several times (10,000 steps NO PROBLEM!), laughing about duck incidents past and present, and spending time with my college kiddos riding rollercoasters and my mom at the bar, less than 24 hours after my plane landed, I was back in the car driving to Central PA for the fifth time in seven weeks. This time, though, it wasn’t because of a visit to my daughter’s college. It was to celebrate my high school choir director and the dedication of a stage in honor of her 21 years of teaching.

I went from 21 trips to Disney to celebrating 21 years on a stage that helped shape who I am today.
Stepping from one kind of history to another, I spent the weekend celebrating a teacher who had a huge impact on so many alumni – enough that nearly 100 of them showed up to perform in a reunion concert. As part of the planning committee, I had a full weekend: setting out the memorabilia, organizing the rehearsal, stepping into the role of stage manager, singing my featured number, and giving the dedication speech. It was over 48 straight hours of organizing people, solving problems, and keeping things moving, but I also spent the weekend talking to people I hadn’t seen in over 30 years, digging deep to find my extrovert self.

There’s something strangely wonderful about reconnecting with people from your past. You meet each other again as fully formed adults while simultaneously seeing flashes of the teenagers you once knew underneath. My time in Central PA made me think about what it meant to grow up in such a small rural school district and how our teacher cultivated our inner talent and helped us grow into pretty cool human beings.

All of the movement from Disney to stage meant that by the end of the weekend, I was exhausted.
I had walked all the world and landed on stage, and in doing so, I realized how much of my life is tied to place. Disney. That stage in my high school auditorium. My parents’ home. The small town where I ran the streets with my childhood friends. Each holds pieces of me. It was a lot of history to confront in a single week. And, of course, I know, All the World[‘s]… a Stage.