(Or: What am I going to do with all this root beer?)

We’ve got three 12-packs of root beer in the pantry. I buy it on sale so we’ll have it around when the Street Urchins come over.

But when we came back from vacation last week, we discovered that the neighborhood is down two Urchins. They’ve both moved to other zip codes, their households casualties of what happens when parents are not together.

I worry about the Street Urchins. Four out of five of our neighborhood Urchins don’t live with both of their parents. That’s Situation Normal for them, and it makes me sad. They bounce around from house to house, and sometimes weeks or months go by without them showing up at our front door, hungry for a game of Super Smash Brothers and thirsty for root beer.

They drive me crazy (they’re loud, and they leave a mess, and sometimes it just gets really rowdy in my family room) but I always let them in. Even the day after I discover that they’ve eaten all the Klondike bars.

They’ve spent their adolescence on their own, with no one hunting them down at dinnertime or wondering where they go when they disappear for the better part of a day and evening. And this September, two of them will be starting at new schools in new neighborhoods. In middle school, that’s hard.

This morning, Sarah Reinhard tweeted a prayer for today:

Yes, those exasperating Street Urchins are blessings (though they’re never invisible).

They’ll be missed.

And they’ll be held up in prayers. I figure that St. John Bosco is a great patron saint for Street Urchins, so I’m trusting them to his care.

In case they visit the neighborhood again (at least one of them still has a parent living here) I’ll make sure we’ve always got plenty of root beer.