Returning home... .

I spotted it yesterday in the dirt along the edge of the driveway, a small green glint in the broken particles of asphalt, small pebbles and loose earth over by the fence. A little plastic green army man brought out of the compacted dirt by the recent hard rain, returning home after being absent for two decades, buried out of sight but not out of mind.

These toys have returned home before, about a dozen over the years since my middle child Johnny, now in his thirties, put away his toy soldiers as he grew into an adolescent and ceased having backyard battles with these tiny warriors arrayed in long battle lines of good versus evil. I haven't seen Johnny since he was 16 nor  heard from him since he was 18 and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his college tuition and fees, which I did. (No, no letter of thanks afterwards nor any invitation to his graduation.)

Whenever one of these soldiers returns, I feel a tug at my heart and lament the extrajudicial and apparently permanent loss of any natural affection for his father by this somber, serious and very smart boy, who loves his mother so and had his will overborne as an impressionable adolescent by her and her coterie of "professionals" through the pernicious application of PAS. I took the broken little man upstairs to the bedroom Johnny used to occupy and laid it on the shelf next to the other broken soldiers who have also returned home.

Someday, maybe, Johnny'll come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. Till then, or if never, I'll have to assuage my continuing grief with these sudden reminders of his and his brothers' presence still in the yard, where he and his brothers used to play, and wish him and them all the best.