Summer 2017

One of our last family tennis matches, late August, 2017.  I promise Whit was also having fun.

This summer was jammed to bursting with beauty.  Possibly it shone particularly because we knew a big departure and ending threatened at summer’s end (Grace’s departure to boarding school), or maybe it just was golden, but for whatever reason there was a particular patina to these three months.  A few highlights:

We kicked off summer with a trip to New Hampshire where we went ziplining.  As is often the case, I felt flattened by the metaphors presented by ordinary life. The kids were brave (and so was I) and we were together.  It was breathtakingly beautiful, flying above the trees.

We spent a lot of time as a family of four (and as a whale pod of three, since Dad did a lot of golfing) at my parents’ house on the Massachusetts shore.  We swam and we biked and we played tennis and we watched LOST and we ate caramel M&Ms and we grilled on the back porch. We played cards, did puzzles, and watched the Red Sox under the slow spin of my parents’ ceiling fan. Our days together were largely unstructured and we put being together as a family above all else.

Whit loved sailing, and I hope he’s found a sport that he can enjoy during the school year.  Grace had a very successful tennis season, playing on our tennis club’s team which qualified for Nationals and personally winning the club U14 singles and with her partner the U18 doubles.

We had two wonderful visits with my sister and her family, over the 4th of July (and my mother’s birthday) and later at our cousin Allison’s wedding.  That wedding was a true highlight of the summer, as we watched a family member we dearly love (she’s precisely in between Grace’s and my ages, and we all think she’s the best) wed her long-time boyfriend who we also adore.  Welcome to the family, TDT!

I kept up my streak of reading books best described as Those You Can Buy in an Airport.  I found myself unable to concentrate on anything more challenging, and sought out stories that were plot, plot, and plot.

I turned 43.  I’m in the thick heart of life’s grand pageant now, there’s no question about it.  I continue to be struck by the non-coincidence that both my birthday and our anniversary land during the weeks of the year that I find the most liminal, the most striated with both endings and beginnings.  It is without question a melancholy time for me, and yet it holds some big celebrations.  This seems apt, and it’s also intensely bittersweet.

August was quiet.  Grace was at home, preparing for boarding school, and I worked a lot of days with her puttering near me.  She spent a few days with Matt’s family in Vermont, which was full of joy and waterskiing.  For anyone curious, Matt did not waterski. We passed the one year anniversary of his injury, and then of his surgery.

Grace and I picked Whit up at camp because Matt was in California, and had a happy visit to the place she spent six summers.  We returned to our pre-camp routine of family dinners, card games, and ice cream.  We saw Matt’s parents when they were here.  We watched some more LOST.  We read together in bed.  It was the best kind of ordinary, and I could see the shimmer in that ordinariness.

And then, just like that, summer came to an end.  September arrived with its host of changes, and our family spun off into its next and new season.  We are all still a little stunned and shaky from these changes – well, I can only really speak for myself here – but also deeply grateful for three months together.  I won’t ever forget the swims to the line, the family tennis matches, the candlelit dinners on our back porch, the quiet walks, the loud laughter.

It was a magical summer.  And now, it is in the rear view mirror.  Onward.