IT WAS quiet in Emporia on Mother’s Day. Most of the university students were gone.
Traffic was light and the parking lots at fraternities, sororities, dormitories and apartment houses were empty or nearly so.
The city seemed suspended in time under the hot, yellow spring sun, like a primeval leaf or insect trapped in amber through the ages.
There was something sad about the quiet — a feeling that will be familiar to the parents whose children have grown up and moved away. It is called the “empty-nest syndrome.” The sometimes-longed-for peace, when it comes, brings with it an emptiness that confuses the heart.
Graduation at the university is always a sad and happy time. Students who have been members of the community for four or five years — members of churches, working as waiters or clerks — finish their studies, say good-bye, pack up their lives and go elsewhere.
The loss is intensified when almost all of the remaining students at the school — freshmen, sophomores and juniors — go home, or off to summer jobs.
No wonder the town seemed to echo on Sunday like an empty gymnasium.
Of course, there will be a new class of freshmen in the fall and Emporians will get to know them over the coming years.
But we’ll miss our young old friends who graduated on Saturday.
We wish them good, happy fulfilling lives and hope that, someday, they’ll come back to visit the nest.