everyday life

Summer 2014

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I’m starting to realize that the reason cliches are cliches is because they’re often true.  Maybe not all, but certainly some.  And the adage that summer goes faster every year?  Oh, yes.  My, that one is true.  And it’s just so bittersweet; so bitter because it IS so sweet.

I’ve been reflecting on what this summer contained and on what it was.

Right after school ended, the four of us spent a weekend in New Hampshire.  This was a very successful example of taking an important family tradition and morphing it to adapt to our growing children.  Instead of going to Story Land during the week with just Grace and Whit, the four of us went ziplining over a weekend.  We stayed at the same hotel, ate at the same restaurant that we loved, visited the same water park.  The weekend was both familiar and new, and it was absolutely marvelous.  The kids loved the adventure and I was so happy to mark the end of a school year with a joyful celebration.

We spent a long weekend with my sister and her family at my parent’s house on the Massachusetts shore.  As always, there was noise and tumult and many, many special memories.  It poured on the 4th of July.  And it cleared into a lovely weekend.  We saw fireworks, we swam in the rain, we went to the movies, we tried to take a Christmas card photo of the 4 grandchildren, we had family dinners around the large oval table, we watched my mother blow out birthday candles.  I love this tradition.

Our hydrangea bush had very few flowers.  We’re chalking it up to the long, cold winter in Boston.  As usual, I can’t stop seeing metaphors everywhere – with the hydrangeas and in general.  The bush is not flowering very much because it is bruised or wounded from a difficult winter.  Hopefully it will heal and burst into bloom next year.

This year our children were away from us more than ever before.  They spent 2 weeks at my parents’ house – a magical interlude with freedom to bike wherever they wanted, a happy and calm camp experience, new neighborhood friends, and lots of downtime with their grandparents – and then 3.5 weeks at camp.  I missed them like a howling ache.  But that’s not why I cried, after dropping them off and sporadically when they were gone.  I cried because at this point I realize the future is studded with more and more goodbyes.  The red cord that ties our hearts is going to keep stretching.  Yes, I trust it.  But I also find it difficult and sad.

Grace, Whit and I went to Niagara Falls for a few days.  I have never been there, and they were excited to see it.  It was just a little adventure and an opportunity to be away, together.  Niagara was home to some of the most staggeringly beautiful natural vistas I’ve ever seen and some of the the least attractive man-made ones.  Fascinating, paradoxical, enchanting.

I had a passionate love affair with peaches.  I can’t explain it.  I learned how to make jam (peach, of course).  I even made pickles.  Just call me Ma Ingalls.

Grace and Whit went away to camp for 3.5 weeks.  They went to the same camp that I went to as a child, a place that remains crucially important to me.  In a childhood of moving around, where I always felt like the new kid or the one about to leave, it was the only place I was just normal.  I treasure their camp, and to watch them love it is a remarkable thing.  I spent the last night of my 30s there, with them, celebrating the close of another wonderful summer.  It was truly magical.

We spent a week on Lake Champlain at the end of the summer.  This has become such an important marker in the summer for me: it’s a way to retain a connection to Vermont, the state where Matt grew up, and a way to reconnect as a family after the children have been away at camp.  They love it there and so do we.

I took August off from this blog for the first time, I read a lot of books, I felt particularly introspective, and I turned 40.

For the last several years I have written a post like this reflecting on the summer that was.  The others are here: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

Another year, another camp drop off

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Leaving home, early Thursday morning

Last week we took Grace and Whit to camp.  This is Grace’s fourth summer, and Whit’s second.  The drop-off doesn’t get easier.  I’m realizing that’s because the experience forces me to confront where we are right now, and in so doing to reckon with all that is already past.  It is impossible to drop them off without realizing in a visceral way that the path forward holds ever-more dropoffs, ever more farewells, that the distance between them and me continues to stretch as we move forward.

Yes, yes, I trust in the red cord that ties our hearts.  I do.  But it’s still hard.

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Beloved, Bear, and Beloved’s Brother lined up on Whit’s pillow at camp.  He ran to join his cabinmates in a game so fast I didn’t even get a picture of him, so I took a photo of these much-loved faces instead.

For some reason, dropping them off and leaving without them – and, maybe most of all, coming back into a house that feels echoingly empty – brings me face to face with many emotions.

I am reminded that my everyday life is full of magic, a truth that Grace saw, and told me, before I ever did myself.  That happened the night before I took her to camp the very first time, and I still think of that conversation all the time.

I think of my dearest lifetime friend, who I met at this very camp many years ago.  When I walk through the familiar camp grounds it feels as though the ghosts of the girls we were swirl around me like dust.  I fall into the black hole of memory where individual moments flash and glint: when I first met Jess, the moment she pulled up to be my co-counselor in cabin 18 after we hadn’t spoken in several years, her gorgeous, sun-drenched wedding, the morning I called her in a whisper to say I’d seen a second, shadowy line on a pregnancy test.  There are a million other memories that drift over me like snowflakes, together forming a bank that is one of the essential bulwarks of my life.

When I think of it I fall into the black hole of memory where individual moments flash and glint: when I first met Jess, the moment she pulled up to be my co-counselor in cabin 18 after we hadn’t spoken in several years, her gorgeous, sun-drenched wedding, the morning I called her in a whisper to say I’d seen a second, shadowy line on a pregnancy test.  There are a million other memories that drift over me like snowflakes, together forming a bank that is one of the essential bulwarks of my life. – See more at: https://adesignsovast.com/2012/08/these-girls-our-girls-this-next-generation/#sthash.CTX137uz.dpuf
When I think of it I fall into the black hole of memory where individual moments flash and glint: when I first met Jess, the moment she pulled up to be my co-counselor in cabin 18 after we hadn’t spoken in several years, her gorgeous, sun-drenched wedding, the morning I called her in a whisper to say I’d seen a second, shadowy line on a pregnancy test.  There are a million other memories that drift over me like snowflakes, together forming a bank that is one of the essential bulwarks of my life. – See more at: https://adesignsovast.com/2012/08/these-girls-our-girls-this-next-generation/#sthash.CTX137uz.dpuf

Most of all, dropping Grace and Whit off presents me with blinding evidence of how much I love my own life.  Right now, this, this mess, this beauty, this noise, this holiness.  This.  These moments, which seem to run through my fingers ever more quickly.  I think of the glorious good fortune that my children will stand in the same outdoor theater that I did, their arms looped around their friends’ shoulders, singing Taps, and also of the keenly painful reality that the years in between those two events have evaporated so quickly I can’t catch my breath.  Then and now, past and present swirl together in a burst of rainbow memory, lit by flashes of lightning, and I swallow, and try to hold back my tears as I hug my children goodbye.

I thought of Churchill’s quote about how “this is not the end.  This is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”  We left the end of the beginning back a while ago already.  And here we are, in the thick of it, life itself, teeming with both laughter and loss, joy and love and sorrow, every single day a tapestry of experience and memory.  Often this crazy quilt overwhelms me, and it did last week as we drove home from camp.

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Grace standing on the way to the beach.  I have walked through this passage hundreds of times.  Last summer Jess and I took photographs at sunset on this beach, and I treasure them.  

 

In the noticing is the magic

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Last week, my dear friend Pam left a comment here in which she mentioned her realization that “in the noticing is the magic.”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that.  Pam’s one powerful sentence startled me, and has suddenly made so much clear.  I write ad nauseum about all the magic I see in my regular life, about the beauty that I experience in the most mundane moments, about the glitter in the grout.

My children see the way the extraordinary shimmers inside the ordinary, and there’s no question that it is because of them that I can now see it too.  The ways in which my children have taught me to see are myriad.  Some are literal, like toddler Whit crouching on the sidewalk to admire a dandelion pushing up between two bricks or eight year old Grace telling me point-blank that my life is full of magic.  Less directly, by stripping bare that brutal truth from which I spent so many years trying to distract myself – that time passes so swiftly it takes my breath away – Grace and Whit have taught me to slow down and to pay attention.

Our lives are full of holiness.  That much is true.  I can’t stop seeing it.  But my revelation – thanks to Pam – is that it is the seeing that makes it so.

Last week, on our second day in Niagara Falls, we went on the Maid of the Mist.  Whit wanted to stand downstairs.  Grace wanted to stand upstairs.  I negotiated this particular impasse and spent half of the boat ride with each of them.  There was some petulance and pouting by Grace and some arguing by Whit and finally I told them to quit it.  After the boat docked we made our way up the wooden walkway underneath the falls, our sneakers soaking wet, the mist pounding us (“mist” seems like a euphemism for a drenching, heavy rain).  I had to walk in between the kids because they were mad at each other.  We didn’t see much on our way up because we were focusing down, on the slippery trail and big puddles.  At the top we turned around. A rainbow.  All three of us gasped.

Magic.

That evening, Grace and Whit squabbled and I yelled at them and threatened to take away the post-dinner water park visit they’d so looked forward to.  They pulled it together, and we went to the water park, and then to watch fireworks over the Falls at 10:00.  It is telling that I can’t remember what they fought about (though I do recall raising my voice and that uneasy, ugly feeling after doing so).  I can remember standing with a child on each side of me, head tipped up, watching the night sky explode with brightness over the breathtaking beauty of the nighttime Falls.

Glitter.

And then we went to bed.  I slept fitfully for the second night in a row because the hotel air conditioning alternated on and off all night long.  In the morning, I lay awake and watched Whit sleeping in the next bed, his monkey, Beloved, clutched under his chin.  Grace’s tousled dark head was just visible on the other side of him.  I don’t know that there’s a sight I love more than my sleeping children.  And all together in a hotel room?  That’s pretty much my favorite thing.  I didn’t care that I was exhausted.  I just watched the shadows of Whit’s eyelashes on his cheeks.

Beauty.

It isn’t that I’m paying attention because my life is magic.

It’s that my life is magic because I’m paying attention.

Thank you, Pam.  You’ve given me my new mantra.  In the noticing is the magic.

As Much As the Sky

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“And in between those days and now there yawns an enormous gulf, an eternity of bathtimes, so many of which, if I’m honest, felt like a chore that I had to suffer through, a final slog before the relief of bedtime. How did I not value every single one? Splashing in the water, tickling Whit’s neck, I want them all back. The truth that I can’t—the basic fact of time’s swift passage—stands between me and the sun. My whole life is lived in its shadow. I blink back tears.”

Click here to read more of As Much As the Sky.

I’m honored to have my first piece up on Mamalode today.  I’d so appreciate if you would click over and read it – I have long admired Mamalode and it’s a privilege to be published there.  Comments here are closed but I would be very grateful to hear from you there!

Overwhelming awareness of this life’s sweetness

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Grace and Whit have just finished two remarkably joyful and relaxed weeks with my parents on the coast of Massachusetts.  One day last week, I left Boston early in the morning and went down for the day to work from there so that I could surprise them at camp pickup.  My work phone has been screwed up anyway, and there’s wifi, so, I thought, why not?

It turned out to be a weirdly, unexpectedly difficult day.  I seemed to be clunking through the world, knocking things over literally and figuratively, Whit was entirely unimpressed to see me at camp pickup (“why are you here?  OK, fine, I’m going to bike home, see you there”), they bickered on the tennis court, and it was hot.  I was generally out of sorts.

The three of us did have a lovely dinner on the back porch in the cooling, beautiful evening air, and we walked to the ice cream store and down to the yacht club to look at the harbor.  This has become a tradition that Grace and Whit like as much as I do.  As we strolled home, Grace sighed and told me how much she loved beautiful evenings like this one.  The air felt soft on my arms.  Dad and I had a fascinating conversation about Walt Whitman (whose work I’m ashamed I don’t know well enough; I’ve already ordered Leaves of Grass) and Grace and Whit calmed down and got in their pajamas and Mum came home from her meeting and suddenly, facing my departure, I felt a swell of keen sorrow. I didn’t want to leave.  As it sometimes does, my life crashed over my head and my responsibilities felt heavy.

I tucked Whit in and he rolled onto his side, his eyes gleaming in the dark.  “I love you,” he said, and gave me our secret sign that means I love you.  “I love you too,” I told him as I stood in the door.  “I’ll see you on Saturday.”

I went down to the kitchen to say goodbye to Grace.  With the eerie ability to see into my thoughts that both she and Whit sometimes display, she gave me a hug, and said, “tomorrow, when you’re at your desk, Mum, just remember that I’m cheering you on.”  My head snapped back to look at her.  Only half an hour ago she’d been pouting that I wasn’t spending the night.  When did she grow into this empathetic, mature young woman who knew how to put what I needed first?  My eyes filled with tears and I nodded.

I hugged my parents and Grace walked me out.  She stood barefoot in her pajamas on the sidewalk and watched me get into the car.  I told her I loved her and she gave me our secret sign and then, as I turned the car on, she leaned into the open passenger window.  “Mummy,” she said, her wet hair wavy on either side of her face, “You’re my wonder woman!”

“Oh, Grace,” I said to her, shaking my head.  “I don’t know about that.  You’re my wonder girl, though.”

I was blinking back more tears as I drove away, and as the road turned left the whole expanse of the sunset came into view.  I gasped out loud.  The sky was striated with red, orange, pink, and I pulled into a parking lot to try to take a picture.  I couldn’t get a good angle so I kept driving, but I did take one of the fading light as I got onto the highway (ab0ve).  As it so often does, the sky acted on my spirit in an ineffable, undeniable way, and I felt the aggravation and challenge of the day ebb almost instantly away.  I thought of my parents, who had each been so fully themselves that day, of my children, arguing on the tennis court and yet appreciating the glorious evening and then knowing exactly what I needed at the end of the day, of this place I had so long loved.  I felt deeply rooted in the world, a sensation akin to the sturdy joy I’ve written about before.  My awareness of this life’s sweetness overwhelmed me, so sharp I felt it in my chest.

And watching the sun go down, I drove home.