This morning while I waited for my coffee to perk, I leafed through the latest copy of Smithsonian Magazine. I keep a few recent magazines in the kitchen to peruse while waiting for coffee to perk or water to boil or whatever. Everyone does that, right? I keep magazines all over the house. The ones by my bed, though, are older than the ones in the kitchen. When I go to bed at night, I can read for about a paragraph before my eyes close and the magazine slips from my hand and lands on the floor with a big thump, startling the poor cats from their snoozes and most of the time waking me up long enough to turn the light out.

But I digress.

I was leafing through Smithsonian Magazine in the kitches and ran into a little blurb about chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. This particular population of chimps has been studied for more than 30 years, so quite a lot of data has been gathered both on the population as a whole and on individual chimps.

When a male chimpanzee reaches maturity, he leaves his mother’s home area and moves elsewhere, there to find new friends and a bit of love and all that. But, when times get tough…

He moves home.

I think that there are many parents out there with grown children who are oscillated in and out of their homes who could relate to this.