Month: September 2011

Eleven years

Eleven years ago, we were married.

In a thunderstorm so loud we had to pause during the vows.

Accompanied by two readings: an excerpt from The Book of Qualities and Cavafy’s Ithaka.

By a minister from East Greenwich, RI, who was dear to my maternal grandparents, especially my grandmother who had recently died.

In the presence of three siblings, four parents, four grandparents, and most of our very best friends.

I wore my mother’s veil, my deceased grandmother’s wedding ring (my only grandparent not in physical attendance, though I swear she sent the thunder), a ponytail, and pieces of blue ribbon that my closest friends had written messages on sewn around the hem of my dress.

And we embarked on a ride which has been nothing like we expected, but full nonetheless of startling joys.  As the minister said, during the wedding, Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to this.  And it isn’t.  But the views are better here, too.

Summer 2011

As I thought back over the summer of 2011, I revisited my reflections on the summer of 2010 and on the summer of 2009.  As usual, I was struck by the simultaneous sense that those months were decades ago and just yesterday.  This was a rich and happy summer, though marbled with the melancholy that I now know is an inextricable part of my life.

The beginning of summer, with its trip to Princeton reunions and half marathon, feels like a distant memory.  June rained and rained and rained, and then the sun finally came out for our week in Marion with Hilary and her girls.  Matt’s parents sold the house he grew up in, and officially are no longer Vermont residents.  This was bittersweet for all.

The fourth of July held its usual fireworks and small-town parade, with the extra bonus of getting to spend it with our cousins.

My mother injured herself and spent a lot of July and August recuperating, which was unexpected.  Her indomitable spirit prevailed, though, and she impressed every single person she encountered with her positive attitude.  I acquainted myself in a new way with the middle place, never more than one night when my daughter cried to me that I wasn’t spending enough time with her because I was with my own mother too much.  I anticipate this getting more tender, and more frayed, as I move forward, not less.

July included a wonderful visit to dear friends on Martha’s Vineyard, our annual overnight hike in the White Mountains, a rainbow cake, and swimming, sunsets, and star-gazing.

Grace went to my beloved former summer camp for 10 days, which began in tears (because she didn’t want me to go) and also ended in them (because she didn’t want to leave camp).

Whit went to Nature Camp and adored it.  It was without a doubt his favorite camp of the summer.  The kids wore name tags made out of rounds of wood and spent their days “ponding” and “bugging” (the latter sounds particularly charming to me).  He couldn’t get enough.  Unfortunately this camp was an hour away in each direction, so for each of the three days he went I spent four hours in the car.

Grace is an outstanding swimmer- we’re talking laps of butterfly, flip turns, etc.  She’s much better than I am.  I have no idea where this came from.  She refuses, however, to think about joining a swim team.  I suspect that my lack of interest in competition of the sporting kind has lived through another generation, for better or for worse.  Probably worse.

I read lots of stuff, but the books that moved me the most were Falling Apart in One Piece and Just Kids.  I also went through (and am still in) an enormous Stanley Kunitz phase.  Wow.  He says, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world” and I nod and cry at the same time.

I participated in Susannah Conway’s August Break, sharing photographs instead of words.  It was a lovely change of pace.

We went back to Legoland and it was every bit as wonderful as last year.  Different, of course, but equally special, joyful, and memorable.

One of my college roommates celebrated her wedding over Labor Day.  We did a bridesmaid flash mob dance (a youtube training video before the weekend, a rehearsal over the weekend, etc) and shocked and delighted the bride, who is an avid and excellent dancer.  It was so much fun!  The weekend was an extraordinary celebration with women who’ve meant the world to me for almost 20 years.  It was also an important reminder for me of where I came from and of who I am.

I think I finally started flossing.  For real!  I know.  How tragic that this merits inclusion here.  But it does.  I also experimented with a week-long cleanse (without dairy, sugar, gluten, refined anything, meat, soy, caffeine, alcohol) which surprised me, frankly, by being hugely informational and profoundly empowering.  I’m not going to live without some of those things, but I suspect I’d feel a lot better if I cut back on others of them.

I took Grace and Whit for a final summer adventure to the beach north of Boston last week, and we had an entirely magical day together.  It was intensely bittersweet, but I’m so glad we did it.

Another season turned to its end.  On Monday night, the night before the first day of school, Whit cried at bedtime.  He told me he doesn’t want to get older, doesn’t want to stop being 6, doesn’t want to go into 1st grade.  How to respond to this, so vivid a reminder of my own rawest and deepest wound?  I don’t know.  I just hugged him, kissed his forehead, told him I knew and I loved him, that that I believed it would keep getting better.  Then he pulled on his favorite red sweatband and went to bed.

The first day of school 2011

On our way to school on a very gloomy rainy morning.  Had to wake both of these guys up from a sound slumber!  (not so myself: the newest incarnation of my life-long friend, insomnia, is that I wake up at 4am and can’t go back to sleep.  yesterday this found me running in the pitch black and pouring rain at 5am).

Whit in his seat at the Red Group table in 1S.

Grace at her desk in 3P.

How is this possible, when these days were five minutes ago?

September 2004, Grace’s first day at nursery school

September 2007, Whit’s first day at nursery school

Consider the possibility

It is impossible to stand at the feet of a mountain, untrembling.
But departure will do no good. The path,
catastrophic, claustrophobic as it is,
nevertheless begs us forward.
Look how it curls, a bent and beckoning finger, into the deeper woods.
Look how its ragged, ruthless stones resemble guideposts.
Don’t leave now.
Fold your shoulders under the brambles. The grazing will
make a mark and that will tell you how close
your own body is willing to come. This is no small thing.
This is the beginning
of everything.
You can find comfort in the most improbable places.
Don’t leave now.
Consider the possibility that you are already home.
Make a web of yourself.
It is here that the feast will fall.

– Maya Stein

Consider the possibility that I am already home.  This is the beginning of everything.  These words fall somewhere deep inside of me, beyond the realm of logic and intellect.  They quench some thirst I cannot articulate, some longing for home that I’ve circled around many times, here and elsewhere.

The path is, often, catastrophic and claustrophobic for me, intimidating and too-close at the same time, full of perils imagined and not.  And yet onward I walk, sometimes frustrated by a sense that I’m going in circles rather than moving forward, trying to accept the cycles of my life, to embrace all that is not at all linear about this life of the spirit.  I’m growing ever more certain that the central lesson is, at least for me, acceptance.  Yielding to what is, and to what is not, and to what will never be.  Leaning into the truth of my life even as I mourn those things that are not as I imagined them.

What if home was, all along, right here?  What if it is something I carried inside myself, all these years?  All of this searching, this sometimes frantic scrabbling, trying on of various hats and identities and shapes … all of it was for naught.  It was here all along, the jewel I sought so desperately.  But of course it was not for naught, I see that, of course I do: all of that effort helped bring me here.  Helped to bring me home.  And another thing I know for sure is that that effort and searching is not over now.  It will go on, and on, in the looping circular patterns that are at once inspiring and agonizing, full of the grandeur and terror of this world we live in.  Circling a mountain that is so majestic that it is impossible to stand untrembling.

Lucky

You know those people who remind you where you came from, and, more importantly, who you are?

Well, I was fortunate enough to spend this weekend with mine.  And I am a lucky woman to have such phenomenal, funny, brilliant, supportive, and dance-loving friends.  The luckiest woman in the world.

(photo is during the toast MKM and I made to the bride on Friday night.  I wish I had a picture of everyone all together, but I don’t, and this captures the general mood of the weekend rather well.)