everyday life

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).

These are days so swollen and wonderful I can barely look at them directly because my heart aches.  It feels like staring into the sun.  I’m so aware of time flying through my fingers even as I grasp at it.  We’re more than halfway through the summer.  This week the children go to sleepaway camp.  Where did it go?

When I originally began this blog, in September 2006 (O.M.G.) it was with the express intention of capturing the details of my life I knew I’d forget.  Grace was 3 and Whit was 1 and already I sensed I couldn’t get my arms around this messy, marvelous, mundane life I was living.

So, returning to those roots, I want to try to remember things this summer, one that I know I’ll recall always as thoroughly-lived.

The season of Percy Jackson.  Whit is cruising through the series.  He tried it a year or so ago and was not captivated.  I decided in June to give him #1 again to see what happened and he fell in love.  He’s starting book 4 and taking it with him to camp.  We watched the movie of the Lightning Thief the other night and I’m smitten by the story too (fun fact: one of my favorite books as a child was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths).

The summer of nail art. Grace is an aspiring nail artist.  Nail art is not my thing, but she’s way into it, and she’s gotten pretty good!  She has done Fourth of July themed nails and is currently sporting stripes and anchors is a blue, pink, and white color scheme.

The season of the front seat. This summer Grace is in the front seat (she was all last year, too, but it seems we spend more time driving in the summer).  I’m getting used to looking over, seeing her there, having her driving the radio.

The summer of sleeping in for Grace.  She’s been known to roll out of bed after 10:30.  I guess she’s really getting to be a teenager!

The season (another) of hydrangeas.  Our front yard hydrangeas are in riotous bloom again, after a quiet year last year with very few flowers.  I love having them all over the house and can track summer’s progression by their changing color.

The summer of Grace cooking.  She loves to cook for us and has made several delicious meals.  She’s still working on the clean-as-you-go process, which I value highly, but it’s so fun to eat what she’s made and she gets tremendous satisfaction out of it. Next up, one of the recipes I read about on Motherlode (thank you, KJ Dell’Antonia!).

The season of family tennis.  We can now have a very competitive game of family doubles.  And we do.  Such fun.

The summer of swimming to the line.  For the first time, Whit joined us on a family mission out to the far border of the area that we’re allowed to swim in at the beach.  He did great.  Now we can go as a foursome.  It’s a long swim, and a great goal-oriented activity for people who have a little extra energy to burn off!

The season of independence.  Grace and Whit loved being with my parents in the small seaside town where they can go wherever they want on their bikes.  For the second summer, Grace volunteered at the local library.  Whit really took to sailing racing.  I love watching them stretch their literal and figurative muscles, growing stronger and more confident every day.

They are not long, these days of blazing sunshine, of pink sunsets out the window and lazy days at the beach.  Of children who are still not as tall as I am and who still want me to climb into bed with them before they go to sleep to snuggle and murmur prayers.  Of family sing-alongs to Top 40 in the car and laughing so hard my stomach hurts.

What is happening for you this summer?  How will you remember it?

I use the hashtag #everydaylife on Instagram a lot.  My goal is to convey the deep appreciation I have for my own ordinary existence.  Am I sometimes frustrated, cranky, tired, and ungrateful?  You bet.  Am I even more often thankful, aware to the point of pain, and struck with wonder?  No question.

So, I thought I’d share some of the #everydaylife moments from an absolutely spectacular three-day weekend.  For many years this has been a family weekend (no doubt driven in large part by the fact that my mother’s birthday is the 3rd).  It’s a weekend I look forward to all year.  My sister, our husbands, and our collective four children all gather with my parents.  It brings a lump to my throat to even write that, by the way.  I’m intensely conscious of how fortunate we are.

Thursday night we arrived in time for a late dinner, and to witness my father reading Swallows and Amazons to the four cousins.  I loved this book as a child, and have vivid memories of him reading to me when I was a child (Treasure Island and The Water Babies feature most in my recollections).

Friday morning dawned clear and beautiful, and Hilary and I enjoyed a supremely special and immensely rare lunch with our mother for her birthday.  I honestly can’t recall the last time the three of us had a sit-down meal alone, together. I’ll spare you the selfie I took of the three of us leaving, but I thoroughly enjoyed every moment won’t ever forget it.

Friday night was birthday dinner, with presents and cake and candles and photographs of Nana with her four grandchildren that I prize.

Saturday started with the small-town parade that we all love.  The children love the candy that the floats throw, we all love the music, and my favorite is the ever-dwindling number of World War II veterans in the parade.  I remember when some of them used to walk.  There was red white and blue, small waving American flags, marching bands, and homemade raspberry, blueberry, and yogurt popsicles by Grace.

We all went out on my parents’ boat and through a series of unexpected twists ended up not joining the yacht club sunflower raft as planned but instead going out for a short sail.  The code flags that we had hoisted to celebrate the holiday ripped off the halyard.  Back on the mooring, we needed to get the halyard, which was billowing loose towards the top of the mast.  First Grace went up in a bosun’s chair, hoisted by my father and Matt. She didn’t make it to the top before we realized the block that the line hoisting her up went through as broken, and quickly she came down.  It was Whit’s turn.  About 2/3 of the way up he started shouting.  “Mummy!  Mummy!  I am terrified!”  We encouraged him to keep going, and he did.  He went all the way to the top of the mast, captured the loose halyard, and came back down again.  It’s hard to see in the picture above, but that’s him at the top of the mast.

I told him the bravest thing I thought he did was admitting he was terrified.  And then doing it anyway.

We had dinner at the yacht club, a location which always gives me slight goosebumps and where the past glints particularly brightly in the present (it’s the location where Matt and I celebrated our wedding reception).  We watched the fireworks, breaths bated.  Grace noted the way you could see the reflection of the starbursts on the water.  Whit said he liked the ones that looked like falling stars best. I thought about how many years we’ve watched these same fireworks, at this same spot, marveling at time’s elasticity, amazed, as I am on a daily basis, at how quickly this life runs through my fingers even as I grasp at it.

We walked home and said goodbye to Hilary and her family, a farewell whose bittersweetness was tempered by how exhausted everyone was.  I woke up missing them yesterday and feel sad that a weekend I anticipate for so long is over.  Sunday was a quiet day, with sleeping in, tennis (we played singles, and it is near the end of days: Grace almost beat Matt, and Whit took two games off of me in a set), and an afternoon when Matt, my Dad, Grace, and Whit went sailing with a friend and Mum and I puttered around.

I was sad leaving yesterday afternoon, and wistful as we drove home (slowly).  Summer is flying too quickly by, as is life itself.  Grace and Whit head to camp in only a couple of weeks, and at that point it’s incontrovertible that we’re into the second half of the summer.  As we crossed the Charles River into our home town, Matt pointed out the colors of the sky, the boathouse, and one of the Harvard houses.  Yes.  There is so much beauty all around us.  And so much sorrow, too.  Lambent colors, seen through the haze of tears.  That what #everyday life is.  It is full of beauty and gratitude and loss and memory and love.  It shimmers.