Month: September 2015

A new year

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Sunset on our last evening walk to the harbor, August 29, 2015.  This is the place where we celebrated our wedding, (15 years ago Wednesday!), and I love that we so regularly visit it during the summer with our children.

I loved Jena Schwartz’s post about her Blue Moon Vows.  Truthfully, I have never been a New Year’s resolution-maker.  New Year’s itself makes me sad, mostly, with the bald way to highlight’s time’s forward motion.  Undeniably, despite this undercurrent of sorrow, there is something new-start-ish about January, and while I don’t make resolutions I feel that surge of energy, that blank-slate sense of possibility.

This time of year always feel like a new beginning to me, too. Something in my spirit will always beat to the academic calendar, and as such the start of a new school year feels both sad and promising.  Summer, my favorite season, is over, and we’re entering something new.  And this year I’m feeling the impulse to say some things out loud.  Less, perhaps, about making promises to change and more about things I now know to be true that I don’t want to lose track of.

1. I will keep protecting my quiet time with my children.  This summer reminded me with punch-in-the-gut force of how limited is the time I have left with both Grace and Whit living with us.  I want to soak it in, to be here.  That has a variety of implications for how I live my life.  Because it’s my most essential priority it is easy to line everything up to support it.

2. I will remember the list of things that are non-negotiable for me to love my life. Sleep, quiet, exercise, time with my dearest friends and my family. It’s a short list, and every item on it is essential.

3. I will remember that I am the sky, and my emotions are just the clouds.  This is so so so so true.  I tell this to my children, and of course it rarely sinks in, at least not in the throes of moments of heartbreak or fury, but I need to keep remembering it too.

4. I will remember to be here now.  Nothing is more important.  This is all we have.

5. I will remember not to eat too much bread or sugar.  It fills me up and I always feel badly after.

6. I will tell the people I love that I love them.  A lot.  See #4.

What are you focusing on this fall?  Do you feel the same sense of a new beginning as I do at the outset of a new school year?

that defines you

I hope you’ll discover, as I have, that its not what lands you in the dark woods that defines you, but what you do to make it out.

– Joseph Luzzi, In a Dark Wood

Summer 2015

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August sunrise, Cambridge MA

Summer 2015 was replete with memories and full of the intertwined joy and sorrow that I now recognize as the fundamental rhythm of my life.

In June, we went to Canobie Lake Park to celebrate school being out.  Grace graduated from 6th grade, which I vividly recall doing myself.  Some combination of this graduation, my 15th business school graduation, and Grace herself made me suddenly, startlingly aware of the ways in which everything is changing.  Parenting a tween, which is rapidly becoming parenting a teen, is not for the faint of heart.

Grace and Whit went to a couple of day camps near our house.  We went for long walks in the still-light evenings, admired sunsets, and read together in bed.  We spent weekends as a family down on the water.  We ate ice cream.

In late June and early July, Grace and Whit spent two weeks with my parents and their cousins.  We had a wonderful reunion of my sister and her family over the 4th of July, which is always a time we gather since my mother’s birthday is July 3rd.  It was a sunny and happy long weekend, full of laughter and shouting and fireworks and my father reading Swallows & Amazons and my mother opening gifts after the traditional angel food cake.  I loved every minute of it.

Grace, Whit and I spent a night at Great Wolf Lodge.  A night was plenty.  They loved the waterslides and the late-night ice cream sundaes though they both agreed one night was enough. While we were there my new goddaughter was born to one of my oldest and dearest friends.  She was born on Whit’s 1/2 birthday and her mother is Whit’s godmother, and that coincidence made me irrationally happy.  I can’t wait to meet her.

Grace and Whit then went to camp.  It was not an easy drop off.  Both of them were tearful, and I was anxious about leaving them.  It didn’t take long for me to realize, though, that in my opinion the value of camp is not in spite of but because of the homesickness.  In fact part of what I hoped to buy with my camp tuition was a few days of discomfort.  So that was fine.  Then things smoothed out, though at the end Whit had some additional challenges.  It’s fair to say that hers was a terrific summer, and his was good though not as spectacular as last year.  They can’t all be The Best Summer Ever, and some difficulty is part of what I’m hoping for, I realize as I walk through adolescence with these children.

I wrote about my favorite books of the half-year at the end of June, and unfortunately did not read a lot else over the summer that I adored.  Kent Haruf’s luminous Our Souls at Night is an exception.  My favorite quotation from the book is here.  I also loved his book Plainsong, and enjoyed some great nonfiction, including Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed (which I plan to review next month for Great New Books) and Julie Lythcott-Haims’ How to Raise an Adult.

After camp the four of us went to Basin Harbor Club, on Lake Champlain in Vermont.  This was our sixth year in a row and we absolutely loved it.  I feel a real tension in my parenting life between horizon-broadening adventures and the comforting cadence of ritual.  Both are important to us as a family, and to me as an individual.  This is a tradition that has come to mean a lot to our family, and a downright glorious week.  There are more memories than I can possibly list from the week, but I wanted to mention two.  Several mornings I woke up at dawn and crept out of the cottage to for a run along now-familiar roads.  Each time the sun rose as I ran, stopping me (literally) in my tracks.  Secondly, on the last morning, as we walked to the waterfront for the last time, a formation of geese flew overhead, honking.  I stood and looked up, hearing Mary Oliver in my head, feeling the brush of fall against my skin.  Here we go, I thought.

We spent the last weekend of August with my parents at the shore, in the place where so many of our summer weekends happened.  It was a weekend of lasts: last sail, last tennis game, last ice cream and sunset.  It was beautiful and bittersweet at the same time.  Just as life is.

How was your summer?

I’ve done these end-of-summer reflection posts for several years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 (an aside: I have been blogging for a long time).