everyday life

We are entering the heart of summer.

These are the days that I live for the weekend, when the children stay up late and we laugh a lot and jump off the boat into the ocean and curl up on the couch and watch Wimbledon until the middle of the day.

They are the days when we lie on grass and watch fireworks, gasping out loud at the finale, with one loud concussive boom after another and the night sky lit up with sparkling white, gold, blue and white.

They are the days of four cousins biking to the ice cream store alone and eating hamburgers on the back porch and swimming out to the line (as far as you can go) as the rain from Hurricane Arthur began to come down in earnest.

They are the days of beach towels and bathing suits strewn on the back porch to dry in the sun and bed-headed Grace and Whit wandering downstairs when they wake up and family tennis.

They are the days of the annual Fourth of July parade and the WW2 veterans making me cry and the marching bands moving me in some inexplicable, powerful way.

The thing is, I’m already starting to mourn this season as I live it.  This is a familiar sensation for me, this nostalgia for something even while I am still very much in it, but rarely is it more keen than during the summer.  Every year it’s earlier, the date when I can feel the whisper of fall underneath all the summer, and I cling desperately to these days.  No matter how hard I try to be here now, though, no matter how much I hope that immersing myself in my life will make time slow down, the moments fall through my fingers like water even as I grasp.

It was hard to come home from the long weekend, honestly.  I loved seeing my sister and her family and some old, dear friends.  There was mess and chaos but there was also so much love, and so many memories.  I was sad on Sunday night, preparing to re-enter regular life, and part of that sorrow was that a part of the year that I so dearly love was over.  Another Fourth of July is gone, and I feel disoriented by how quickly this life is flying by.  Two years ago I posted pictures from the annual parade and when I view them tears fill my eyes. Just as I said then: everything and nothing changes.

I am already nostalgic for those early weeks of camp, for June, for when summer was brand new and unfurled in front of us, shimmering.

Early in those mornings, I drove Whit to meet the bus to hockey camp.  We were always early.  Two weeks is plenty of time for a tradition to develop: he clambered into the front seat, scanned the radio for a song he likes, and talked.

Then, as soon as I got home, I woke Grace up before the camp she had to go to.  Every single morning she was longer, leaner, browner.  I forgot to put sunscreen on her the first two days of soccer camp, which was outside, (terrible mother alert!) and she is now savagely tan.  She surely doesn’t have my skin.

One late-June evening we had a family picnic at a nearby park.  Then Grace and Whit went to play on the playground and I watched them, feeling grateful again that they still play on playgrounds, that they (sometimes) enjoy each others’ company, that it was still light at 7:30 in the evening, that we live – and I was able to be – here, now.

Now we are into July, new camps, new routines, new rhythms.  My favorite season is running through my fingers even as I grasp at it, and I feel real sorrow about that.  I’m trying to brush it away to enjoy these months of late light and relaxed schedules, and sometimes I succeed.

When I realized, late, that Grace needed closed-toe shoes to sail at camp, she tried on an old pair of Sperrys of mine.  And, while still slightly big, they worked.  What?????

We’ve been playing a lot of family tennis.  We can play a real doubles game, and last weekend Matt and Grace played a set of singles.  He beat her.  6-1.  But still: she took a game.  I’m pretty sure she could beat me.  Every time we go to the charming tennis club near my parents’ house I think of our rehearsal dinner, celebrated here on a perfect evening in September 2000.

We went for a late afternoon sail with my parents and picked up a mooring in a harbor across the bay.  We were next to a boat that my father grew up admiring.  Grace and Whit jumped off the boat into the cold water.  We sailed home in the swollen late-day sunshine.  We had dinner at the mooring and then took the launch home, the very boat that Matt and I left our wedding reception on so many years ago.

Past and present collided, my mother and my daughter at the helm sailing across the waters we all know so well, the spot where Matt and I celebrated our rehearsal and our wedding, my shoes, the outrageous light of a midsummer evening.

Life is a benediction and an elegy all at once, every day.

Several weeks ago I read a wonderful piece by Wendy Bradford post about the small notes she and her children leave each other.  It made me smile, because this is a way that Grace, Whit, Matt, and I communicate too.  The themes of the notes have changed over time, but we have always written small missives to each other.

There are the notes in the lunchboxes, yes.  I don’t write them every day, but I always do when I’m traveling for work and sometimes otherwise, too.  I have a pad of little jokes that I sometimes put in their lunches, too.  I’m not sure when they’ll be embarrassed to have a note from their mother in their lunch, but not yet, so I’ll keep going.  Last week I wrote the last lunchbox notes for 3rd and 5th grade and, yes, tears came to my eyes as I did so.

Some afternoons I have a babysitter who picks the children up from school and brings them home.  Often, they come home to find my office door shut, if I’m on a conference call or talking to a client.  Almost every day, Whit writes a note with a question and slips it under my door.  There’s always a place for me to respond, whether it’s “yes” and “no” with little boxes next to them or a blank line for me to fill in.  These always make me laugh.

There are the apology notes, which often come from Grace these days.  She will get mad about something, pout, and later, write me a note apologizing and explaining.  What I have to learn to do is not to react in the moment, and to trust that the resolution will come.  The truth is I worry someday (and soon) it won’t come, and that fear animates a lot of my reactions.  Whit writes them sometimes too, including the time he told me that he loved me more than Legos and books combined (and made a Lego flower to go with the note).

And then there are the love notes.  These are, of course, my favorites.  Grace writes poems and cards, though the frequency of these is dropping (something I wrote about in This is Childhood: Book & Journal: Those Precious Early Years).  The most recent one that touched me had, in large writing on the front, “Thank you for working so hard!”  Sometimes they are formal “letters” – Mother’s Day (the envelope of one of which is featured above, from Whit), birthdays – and sometimes they are just little scribbled notes on pads of paper on my desk that I happen upon.  Like the note above and below.

One of my fiercest wishes as my children get older and move into the challenging tween and teen seasons is that they keep talking to me.  These notes seem one way to keep that alive, and while they’re minor, each represents the desire to say something, to connect, to be heard, and for that I am grateful.  As I keep learning over and over, life is in the small things.  These tiny missives, angry, apologetic, loving, or funny, are small and big.  I hope Grace and Whit keep writing them.