everyday life

Everyday life

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The second half

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There is so much beauty in my front yard.  No, this metaphor doesn’t escape me.

Last Friday morning, I spilled an entire cup of coffee on my laptop.  It died immediately.  I spent the next several hours at the Apple store, then, once home, on the phone with Apple customer service because setting up the new computer did not work as smoothly anticipated.  And by that I mean it was not smooth at all.  I was particularly panicked because the computer’s hard drive was shot and the only chance I had at recover 25,000 photos and two books and a zillion essays was my external hard drive.

Thankfully, it worked eventually, but it was a long, emotional day, made harder because I was so furious at myself for knocking over the coffee in the first place.  Stupid and careless, yes.  Human, yes.

And let me say I’m aware of my great good fortune in even letting this be an issue.  Yes, I could go buy a new computer, and this is hugely lucky.  I know.  This is the definition of a first world problem.  All of what’s going on with me right now is a first world problem.

But somehow the computer, and the stupidity, and the unanticipated expense, and the overwhelming terror that I had lost so many things that matter to me just broke through some final, gossamer-thin reserve.  I lost it.

I’m just really tired. The truth is this has been a difficult half-year.  Since January there have been a parade of health concerns and unanticipated stresses in our lives.  I’ve struggled to sleep and we all know that makes everything more difficult. Everything is fine.  Yes.  Everything is fine.  But it’s felt like a slog, more than any other year I can recall.

There is still so much beauty.  I see it every day (which you can see on Instagram).  I hear poetry and quotes in my head on a daily basis, too, and they remind me powerfully of how extraordinary and rich my every day life is.  These observations buoy me; I described them in aggregate once as a sense of sturdy joy, and that’s what they are.  I bob on these swells of awareness every day.  What I’ve learned is that this can be true and I can still feel not-great.  I try not to complain, and I’m aware how miniscule my concerns are in the grand scheme of things, but the truth is I’m really worn out.  This has been a challenging 6 months.

And yet it is just life, isn’t it?  All of this.  The obstacles and the difficult days, the tiredness and the bickering children and all the ways adult life has wound more circuitously than we’d imagined.  This is life itself, and if I know one thing it’s that waiting for the challenging stuff to be over is the ticket to wasting your days.  These obstacles are life.  And as long as I can see the beauty, and bury my nose in the hydrangeas, and gasp out loud at a sunset, well, then I think I’m still doing fine.  I read my friend Tara Sophia Mohr’s post yesterday with a deep, settling feeling of recognition, identification, and thank-goodness-me-too.  This incarnation is not for the faint of heart.  No.  No, it is not.

Still, I wish a few days of ease, a few nights of sound sleep, some rest and peace.  That’s what I hope for now.  Today is the first day of the second half of 2015, and I’m ready.

Selfie sticks at the Louvre

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Grace and my father at the Louvre.  All the selfie-takers were focused on the more famous art, and this room was deserted.

“The stick is the sword in the selfie army,” my 10 year old son observed as we walked underneath the Eiffel Tower, last month in Paris. I looked at him, laughed, and dodged another group of tourists gathering together to take a photo of themselves with the soaring steel gridwork of Paris’s most famous landmark in the background.

We were in Paris for a week. We saw the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, Napoleon’s tomb, more pieces of art and history than I can remember. We also saw dozens and dozens and dozens of people taking selfies. At the Louvre we couldn’t see the more famous works of art. We couldn’t see through the thick throng of phones, held overhead.

The people had their backs to the art. They were looking at them through the camera lens, and with their own smiling face in the foreground. Maybe I’m old. Well, actually, yes, I’m definitely old. But still, I found it shocking.

I was shocked because people weren’t looking at Paris. They were looking in the lenses of their phones. This once-in-a-lifetime experience was mediated through the lens of a phone camera. I’ve observed this before, particularly at school concerts and plays. I have been guilty of this, myself, of missing whole swaths of an experience or a performance because I was so focused on getting a good photo of it. All around me, in the lower school gym, there are glowing screens and parents videotaping a concert. Their witnessing of the experience is secondary to their recording of it. In the last few years, though, I’ve tried harder to put my phone down and to simply be here now – be here now, what my someday-maybe-dream tattoo will say, on my wrist – and trust that the memories I make are richer and more colorful than any photo would have been.

What I saw in Paris was different than what I’ve seen in the lower school gym, though. Yes, the parents and the tourists were both mediating their experience through a camera lens. But the tourists were experiencing Paris backwards, in order to make sure they themselves were in the photos.   They weren’t looking at the city; they had their back to it.

The truth is, this question felt uncomfortably close, because I’m often anxious about the solipsism inherent in writing personal essay. Is it the same thing as what I observed in the Louvre, people inserting themselves into every photo? It strikes me that it’s not. I write what I see, and my gaze is turned out, onto the world. The essays I write – and, perhaps more importantly, the ones I am drawn to reading– are insistently outwardly focused. They are about subjectivity only in so far as that is the filter through which the world is viewed.  This makes me think of the Aikra Kurosawa quote: “An artist is one who does not avert her gaze.”  When I read that passage, I think of writers and artists whose work I admire: their gaze is outward. 

What I witnessed in Paris, which made me sad, is the insistent viewing of oneself in every frame. The lens is literally turned. The photo, or the essay – and the experience – is self-reflexive. It’s about the subject primarily, rather than secondarily.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the young adults whose back was to Paris. Yes, it made me sad to see this, but what’s really going on? IS that generation insecure about their place in the world? What underlies their aggressive need to assert that they are there? Or has the culture become so self-centered that all that matters is our own experience of something, of documenting that we were there?

I’m not sure. But I do know that there’s something sad about turning your back to Paris, even if you get a great shot of your face with the blurry Mona Lisa in the background.

I wrote this piece after our March trip to Paris. 

Solstice: light and shadow

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Saturday night after-dinner walk with ice cream.  The Bermuda flag is flying because the race to Bermuda just left from our town.

Yesterday was the summer solstice.  This is second to the winter solstice for me as a holy day, but it is an important one nevertheless.  The winter solstice occurs in the darkest week of the year, during the beginning of Boston’s cold, snowy months.  And yet it is somehow a more hopeful day for me than the summer solstice, which takes place at the height of light, the frenzied pitch of spring and summer’s fecundity, when the world positively bursts with potential.  I can’t help sensing, somewhere deep inside of me, that we’re now shifting back towards the darkness, towards shorter days, and from here on for the next six months we will be losing light.

That sounds pretty depressing, I know.  Particularly because I write these words while sitting in the living room of my parents’ house on the water, surrounded by books and half models of sailboats and with the ticking of the beautiful grandfather clock that lives in the corner of the room.  The clock features in my childhood memories of my paternal grandparents’ house in Long Island, and when I look up at it I sense them near.  Later in the day, I cut two peonies from a bush that my mother transplanted from her father’s garden and put them on our dinner table.  It only struck me on Sunday, Father’s Day, that it was likely not an accident that I felt both of my grandfathers so nearby all weekend.

There was some gloom on Saturday, despite it being so beautiful.  Part of that was the tangible presence of my grandfathers, who were vividly present.  Another part of it was both Grace and Whit were crabby, and more than once we tangled, tempers flared, and a few tears were shed.  It was far from a perfect Saturday.  There were raised voices, crossed arms, and hurt feelings.

Despite these shadows, the world is also awash in light.  On Friday night the four of us went to see Jurassic World, the very first time we’ve gone to a movie as a family of four, though I have taken the children to many, many movies by myself.  It was entertaining and full of messages that we discussed as we drove home.  Both children noted that nature seemed to do better when you didn’t mess with it (the movie focuses on a genetically-modified dinosaur). When we left the movie theater, around 9:15, light was still visible in the sky.  A sliver moon was rising on the horizon, and I tried to take a picture, overcome, as I so often am, by the beauty of the world.  These are the most heightened, light-filled days, and yet deep within me I’m aware of something shifting, below the reach of words or logic.

Hilary sent me a poem late last week that she thought I would like.  She was right.  I love the way this poet, who is new to me, touches on life’s ordinariness and beauty, the way she evokes the long view, the ancient vista, that essential sense of the eternal, age-old universe that throbs under my daily life and to which I feel closer at the solstice than at any other time of year.  We spin on.  The earth under our feet, the great green ball on which we live, this tiny speck in a universe whose enormity we cannot fathom.

My earthly time is sweetening from all of this, memories and ghosts and tears and crankiness as much as joy and ice cream and laughter and sunsets, I know that to be true.  It’s all a part of my life, shadow and light intertwined, even on the longest days of the year.

Solstice

Tess Taylor

How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view

turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.

We build no henge
but after our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—

Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress.
We head home in other starlight.

Our earthly time is sweetening from this.

Mother’s Day 2015

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Mother’s Day in 2015 started at 6am with hockey and soccer. There was a homemade, elaborate afternoon tea from Grace and a Minecraft firework show from Whit, new running glasses from Matt and family dinner by candelight. I’ve said goodbye to sippy cups, cribs, carseats, and naps, and hello to social media, not knowing which yoga pants are hers and which are mine, so much sports gear, and constantly figuring out where the borders and boundaries are. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that my every day is filtered through the lens of nostalgia and I can’t stop thinking that there are more days with them at home behind us than there are ahead of us. As I get older, the truth is I am certain of less, but one thing I know for sure is that family life is holy. Being with these two, and Matthew Russell, is absolutely sacred to me. What an enormous blessing it is, all of it, even with the exhaustion and crankiness and moodiness, even as the shadows of the teen years loom, even with all the endings and losses and farewells. There are still so many adventures to be had, and a memory bank so rich and full that I could live in it forever.

I shared this picture, and these words, on Instagram on the evening of Mother’s Day.  It was a wonderful day, though not a perfect one.  Is there any other kind of wonderful?  Not in my life, there’s not.  I was tired, and I still don’t feel 100% (though I’m much improved), and Whit fought me at bedtime.  But there was also an early morning of heading out to various sports activities, and an impromptu visit with my own parents, which was very special for me, and both children decided, of their own accord and with no coaching from me, to give me presents that were experiences more than things.  I love this so, so much.

Grace worked for days and then on Sunday afternoon for a while on an elaborate afternoon tea on the back porch.  She had made brownies, tea sandwiches, and drinks in hand-painted mason jar water glasses.  She made a big sign that said “Best Mum” and also made a garland and decorated stand for the sandwiches.  It was absolutely adorable.  We sat on the (tiny) back porch and chatted while enjoying our ice water, jelly beans, brownies, and sandwiches.  I was and am floored by her thoughtfulness, her planning, her resourcefulness, and by 45 minutes I will never forget.

Whit made me a world.  In Minecraft.  It included signs on buildings that said “happy mother’s day,” a pig named (and labelled) “Lindsey,” and a fireworks show.  He walked me through the world on our (only) television, because he somehow figured out how to project his laptop onto the screen.  I was awestruck.  It was so creative, and so personal, and took so much work.  I watched the sunbursts of different-colored fireworks through tears.

I thought a lot on Sunday about my own matrilineage, but I also considered those friends of mine whose mothers are no longer with them (on this earth, that is).  I have had dear friends lose their mothers, in some cases mothers who were my other-mothers.  Part of what makes this moment on life’s ferris wheel so bittersweet is, of course, those losses, and their shadow over my life.  Our children grow up, and we age, and so do our parents, and we all inch forward, taking a pew closer to the front of the church, to the end of the line.  It’s so maudlin and negative to say that, I know, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t on my mind.  My friends who had lost their mothers – and those mothers themselves – were strongly in my thoughts on Sunday.

So for all the laughter, and there was a lot of it (see below, two outtakes from the now-annual front-porch photo session) a faint vein of melancholy threaded through the day.  Who am I kidding, though?  That’s true of every day for me.  Allelulias and farewells, endings and beginnings, firsts and lasts, another day on this magical, spinning ball.  I’m both intensely aware of and fiercely grateful for all of it.

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