everyday life

Around here

I used to share photo posts more often, and I want to return to that practice.  It helps me see all the breathtaking beauty in my own life. I do share photos on Instagram, but I hope to so here more frequently.

We’re in the thick of fall now, the rhythms established, the pace fast. The leaves are changing around us, and keep thinking of the first line of the only short story I’ve ever published: so many thing are at their most beautiful just before they die. Indeed.  The fall is a bittersweet season for me.  Even more bittersweet than the rest of the year, you could say.

So: a few moments from around here so far this fall.  Nothing is perfect, of course, but in the end, everything is perfect.  How lucky we are.
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My brand-new goddaughter came to visit.  It was magic.  Even more incredible, for me, was watching her with Grace and Whit.  I took photographs that I’ll cherish forever of them looking at her and her looking at them.  The generations tumble on and I’m so immensely grateful for the brief moments that I can share with the friends (like my goddaughter’s mother, who I met when I was 16) who knew me when I was becoming who I am.  IMG_7880

I spent a weekend in Shelter Island with 16 friends from college.  Above is one of my three roommates, during our sunset kayak on Saturday evening.  I wrote about the weekend here, and acknowledged that as I get older I’m better able to embrace and sink into the mystery that fills the space between us.  I’m so hugely thankful for that mystery; instead of trying to understand it, I just let it envelop me now.  A reader commented that that sounds a lot like grace, and that sentence brought tears to my eyes.  Yes, it does.IMG_8023

Whit got drafted into the Majors in our local Little League, and had his first scrimmage.  Once again he’s the little guy on the team, but it’s so much fun to watch him stretch his wings.  He also returned to the ice, and as I write this on Columbus Day weekend Matt texted me to say he just scored!IMG_8084

The cross-country season began.  I returned to the starting and finish line, wellies on and umbrella up (it seems to rain every race), cheering myself hoarse.  Grace is markedly more anxious this season than last, now that she feels the weight of expectation.  We’ve been talking a lot about Beginner’s Mind.  She’s two weeks from 13 now, and she’s in the woods, and I’m waiting for her to emerge.  I know she will.  And I trust that she knows I’m there cheering for her, even if she can’t see me.  IMG_8151

I spent four days on the west coast, including a work retreat near the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was as magnificent up close as I imagined it would be.  I woke up extremely early in the morning when I was out there at (around 3:30 PT) and was pretty exhausted, but it was wonderful to be there.  And, as always, going away reminds me how much I love my home and the details of my mundane, marvelous life.

 

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?

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).

They are not long, the days of Percy Jackson and nail art

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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?

 

World Cup

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Like so many others, I loved watching the Women’s World Cup and was deeply moved by the United States team’s decisive triumph on Sunday night.  The sea of red, white, and blue and the national anthem all felt incredibly fitting at the end of the Fourth of July weekend, but more than anything, I was wowed by the athletes.

Yes, by their ferocious play.  By how they didn’t give up.  By their clear orientation towards teamwork.  I love what I read (and I can’t remember where) about someone asking one of the women what their “secret” was, and her response that “My secret is I’ve trained my butt off for 12 years.”  Amen to that.

I loved how after the win the team went and stood in front of the section of the stadium that clearly held their families.  They had tears and delight in their eyes as they danced, wept, and pointed up to their loved ones who’d been watching.  Abby Wambach kissed her wife, who leaned over so perilously I worried for a sec she’d fall.  It was abundantly clear to me that the US women wanted to celebrate first with each other (and I love all the photographs of them hugging, in huge groups) and immediately after, with their families.  I loved the way there was no drama about the way the two elder statesmen of the team were the ones to hoist the cup.  The person who won the game with her three goals (Carli Lloyd) and the big names on the team (Alex Morgan, Hope Solo) walked to the podium without complaint or hesitation, leaving the honors to the women who’d been on the team the longest, Abby Wambach and Christie Rampone.

I loved the clear dedication and loyalty I saw between each and every member of the team.  I mentioned to Grace that I loved the way the team looked communicating with their families.  She agreed, but added, “Well, I also liked how whenever someone from USA or Japan tripped each other or collided that patted each other on the back.  They just seemed really respectful.”  And how.

I’m hardly the only mother in America who’s jubilant at these newly-famous role models for our children.  My friend Kennedy wrote this on Facebook, and it brought tears to my eyes.

And now I coach my daughter, who is one of 2 million girls in the US who play soccer. Hopefully her heroes will be Carli Lloyd and Abby Wambach and Alex Morgan, who talk all about team, and sacrifice, and hard work. They are elite, awesome athletes who don’t get red cards, don’t whine, don’t dive, don’t scream or curse on TV. They play their asses off, they pick each other up, and they never stop fighting.

They are truly wonderful representatives for our country.

And now, today, they are champions of the world.

The only thing that marred the final match for me was the Robert Palmer girls who came out at the end, holding trays of medals.  After such a fantastic, triumphant celebration of what womens’ bodies can do, it felt jarring and incongruous to observe this focus on what womens’ bodies look like.  I watched the women in tight, short black dresses and high heels mince onto the field with a fair amount of shock.  I know I’m not the only person who note this.

Let’s change that, FIFA.  Grace may not be playing soccer anymore, but I’m thrilled at what these women represent for both she and Whit and for all of our children (and adults!): the value of teamwork, respect, hard work, and never giving up.  #likeagirl, indeed.