Month: July 2011

Full of magic

Last Thursday morning we dropped Grace off at sleep-away camp (is it sleepover camp, or sleep away camp, and is there a hyphen?  I cannot figure this out) for 10 days.  Her anxiety about going had been mounting for the week or two prior to July 21st, and I was expecting some tears, and then some fireworks, at bedtime that last night.

Instead, she was calm, and quiet, though visibly sad.  We read several extra pages of Harry Potter, with Grace curled up close to me, rapt as we heard Hagrid’s story of his summer tangling with the giants.  I stopped reading after our normal amount, she looked at me with saucer eyes, endlessly deep and shining with tears, and I didn’t even say a word before turning back to the book to finish the chapter.

Then I took her to her room, and tucked her in.  I lay next to her on her narrow pink bed, as I do many nights.  “Sing me your favorite song from camp, Mummy,” she asked.  And so I did, whispering Christopher Robin to her, our heads leaning together, foreheads almost touching.  She had to have been breathing my breath as I sang.  I rubbed her back through her pajama top, singing the song twice through. When I was finished I heard her murmur, “I love you, Mummy.”

“It’s time for you to go now, isn’t it?”  she lifted her head up and looked at me.  I nodded.  My own eyes were glassy.  To miss ten days of this?  What was I thinking?  She swallowed and glanced over at her yellow and brown bears.  Then, back to me.  She nodded.  “Okay.”  She lay back down and twined her arms around my neck.  “I’m going to miss you,” she started to cry softly and I felt her tears on my skin.

“I’m going to miss you too, Gracie.”  I pressed a kiss to her forehead.  She pulled back to look at me.

“You will?”

“Oh, yes.  Grace,” I began, haltingly.  “One thing to remember is that you will be at camp, having all of these new experiences, new friends, and adventures.  Singing that song, for example!” A small giggle erupted out of her at that.  “And I’ll be here in my ordinary life.”

“Mum!”  Grace sat up suddenly.  Her cheeks shone in the dusk of her room, dark except for the light that slanted in from the hall.  Her voice was practically stern.  “Your life is not ordinary.  Your life is full of magic.”

Why, yes it is.

Hollow and hilly lands

We have some happy days and some unhappy days, some great loves and barren spaces.  We have this life, this instantaneous blossoming.  Will I ever learn not to choose among its moments, will I ever learn to walk both its hollow and hilly lands?

– Ellen Gilchrist, Starcarbon

the girls we were

We met in a cluttered cabin full of bunk beds, trunks, old-school tape-deck radios, and pink pattered pillowcases.  We walked to the shower cabin with our shampoo in square plastic buckets with handles, wood chips sticking to our feet even though we wore flipflops.  She starred in the camp musical.  I watched and applauded, my cheeks hurting from smiling.

We sang Christopher Robin and Barges and Landslide.  We walked on the beach at low tide and swam in the ocean at high tide.  We watched movies in an old, damp cabin on rainy days.  We dressed in all white on Sundays, watched the flag come down, and went to weekly vespers services.  We fell in love, with boys and then with men and most of all with each other.

We wrote endless letters back and forth across an ocean.

We stood by each other at the altar on our wedding days, in June 1999 and in September 2000.  Her wedding day: hot and sunny.  My wedding day: pouring rain and thunder.

We had daughters, 12 weeks apart to the day.  She was the first person I called on the morning I got the startling surprise of two faint lines on the pregnancy test.  We read books and poetry and talked about them endlessly.  We kept writing letters, now mostly digitally.  Heartache rolled through each of our lives, leaving a similar burning and emptiness in its wake even though its flavors were different.  We experienced pain and loss and incandescent joy.  We shared it all.

Our hearts always lean back to the ocean and to each other.  Always back to those formative summers on Cape Cod.  Back to beach grass and dunes and tides and sunsets and acoustic music and words, words, unfurling on the page and beyond the horizon.  Back to the girls we were.

And now it is their turn.

Mysteriously I could not find a picture of us as kids at camp.
Top photograph: Matt’s and my engagement party, September 1999.
Bottom photograph: Visit at camp, summer 2010.

Halfway through

I’m stunned that we are already halfway through summer. This surprise is not unlike the way spring’s arrival startles me every year.  We round the curve to the Fourth of July, cheer at the wonderfully small-town-ish parade at my parents’ house, and suddenly things seem to move more quickly.  Grace is off to sleepaway camp tomorrow.  Whit is hitting tennis balls over the net with increasing regularity.  Everyone (but me) is getting blonder and tanner.

This is the full, hot, high noon of summer.  We have actually drifted past noon, I suspect.  A few images from the past weeks:
She wears her glasses everywhere.

There was much rejoicing when I told Grace and Whit that we are going back to Legoland.

This guy?  Makes me laugh. Every. Single. Day.  I try to let him pull me back from the melancholy that pulls at me like a tide.  Some days, that works.

A beautiful, peaceful walk on our last morning in Martha’s Vineyard.  Lighthouses, like maps, are an ordering theme for my whole life.

Whit got his own library card.

The kids and I made a rainbow cake.  I was reminded of how the chocolate cake for breakfast surprise blew their minds.  They are easily thrilled, these two, and I admit I consider that an excellent thing.  One of the things I want most for my children is that they remain open to moments of wonder, even – or especially – in the smallest details of life.

The annual overnight hike in NH was simply lovely, a respite from real life, a re-immersion in these two women, whom I love so dearly. who are my vital extended family.  The three of us hiked all the way up together, an experience that I adored both in reality and as metaphor.

And then there was a lot of laughing on the deck of the hut.  A whole lot.

And a stunning sunset that, of course, brought tears to my eyes and tapped me immediately back into the eternal, the divine, that which we can glimpse – if we believe in it – all around us at any time.  The truth is I see it in all of these photographs.

A whole universe sparkling inside

“Another person is like a geode lined with hidden glittering.” – Catherine Newman

I believe this to be true.  I believe this with all my might.  I’ve been privileged enough to have gazed at this glittering, in awe, inside another person.

What I’m contemplating, lately, is that if I believe this about others, I might have to believe that it is also be true of me.  Right?  The last few nights, lying in bed before I fall asleep, I have seen a twinkling behind my eyelids.  I can’t describe it other than that – but I’m wondering if it’s the hidden glittering winking at me.  On the rare occasions that I let myself lean into a wave of trust, I can imagine that there is a whole universe sparkling inside of me.  An expansive space, a black sky speckled with constellations whose forms I don’t yet know how to read.

I have only seen passing glimpses of this world, and, frankly, only recently.  Why has it taken me so long to see it?  I suspect that it’s because to do so I need to squeeze my eyes closed, need to to firmly shut out all outside input, advice, and approval.  I have to go dark, as I wrote about in January.  While I’m drawn to this, like the reverse of a moth to a flame, it remains hard for me.

I wonder why all that is within me is pressing on the insides of my eyelids right now, trying to get my attention.  I guess it makes sense: this has been a tumultuous time, limned with a lingering shadow of farewell that I still don’t quite understand.  Perhaps all of that transition and letting go is making room for something burrowed within me that hasn’t had the space – or time, or courage, or what? – to come forth before.  Perhaps all of this is just the fundamental not-knowing of midlife sinking in, the beginning, at last, of my accepting that my home is inside the questions and not the answers.  Maybe I’m finally getting comfortable in my own skin, and my body is beginning to offer up deeply-buried messages.

I don’t know.

I do know that I’ve glimpsed a planetarium sky that I want to study, to watch, to learn by heart.  I want to live there.

Photograph is by my talented friend Meghan, who has brought a group of creative women together as a Tribe.  I am deeply honored to be included, and while I missed the first retreat in June, I’m looking forward to 2012 in Oregon.  It is exceptionally rare for me to like a photograph of me, and I like this one.  Thank you, Meghan!