everyday life

I hope you dance

Yesterday morning, Grace and I drove Whit to camp.  This week is lacrosse camp for him, and she is home because she heads to sleepaway camp on Thursday morning.  En route, “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack came on the radio.  I turned it up.  “Listen to this, guys!  No, really.  Listen.  This is the best summary I know of what I want for you both, as your mother.”

I glanced back in the rear view and saw that they were both listening.  Each was turned, looking out of the window on their side of the car.  Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance, sang Lee Ann.

“Well, we do that, Mummy.”  Grace chimed in.

“We do?” I smiled.

“Yeah, we look at the sky all the time!”  Whit added.  We fell silent again, listening.

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean came out of the radio.  “I know what that feels like!” Whit laughed.  “When I swim out to the raft, or when we jump off the boat into the ocean, I feel tiny!  Sometimes it’s sort of scary!”  Grace nodded with a faint smile on her face.

When the song came to an end, I turned the radio off.  “What do you guys think that means, I hope you dance?”

“I think maybe it means doing big things, having experiences.  Right?” Grace said.

“Also, taking risks?” Whit offered.

“Yes.  I think it means living life, you know?  Jumping in.”

“Like we do off the boat, or we did at Walden that day?” Whit asked.  I remembered the two of them hurtling headlong into the clear, still water of Walden Pond early in the morning, remembered the peals of their laughter in the morning stillness.

“Yes.  Exactly.”  I blinked back tears.  “And you know, the other line I really, really love in that song is I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.”  The brake lights in front of me blurred.  I peered in the rear view mirror again.  They were both staring out their windows.  I started to say something and then I stopped myself.  I focused on the lights in front of me and I drove.  Grace and Whit were quiet in the back.

After a couple of minutes of silence, I finally said, “I really do hope that, you know.  Probably most of all.  Never lose your sense of wonder.  There’s magic everywhere, and I hope you can always see it.”

Hydrangeas

I love hydrangeas.  They remind me of the summer in this part of the world, of faded clapboard houses and halyards snapping against masts and our wedding day.  I’ve always particularly liked blue hydrangeas, and only recently realized it’s because they are basically the same color as a saturated sunny sky (and, also, as my son’s blue eyes).

But I think there are other reasons I love these flowers so.  As Heather commented on my post last week, hydrangeas last and last.  They are sturdy and durable flowers.  And their colors shift subtly as the season turns forward.  The blue gets deeper and then, in August, shifts again, fading to a purplish green.  I love tracing the passage of weeks in the changing colors of the flowers in my front yard.  That love has a hem of sadness in it, though, because the changes present irrefutable proof of time’s passage.

The thing I love best, though, is the way the composition of a hydrangea’s soil dictates the color it is.  As you can see from this photograph (taken down the street from my parents’ house, and upon exclamation by Grace that there were “multicolored flowers!”) sometimes this variation happens within a single bush.  This is tangible evidence of the power of terroir.  I think often of where I’m from, of the ways the thread of the past glints through the fabric of now.  Hydrangeas, blue or pink depending on the pH of their soil, are an irrefutable manifestation of the way the circumstances we grow and live in shape who we are.  And this is, I think, the most beautiful thing of all.

Transition

My childhood was punctuated by a series of transitions as regular as a drumbeat.  They were not easy, thought they were an integral part of the rich and complex terroir in which I grew up.  I learned, early on, about the deep bittersweetness of goodbyes.  My family’s moves, back and forth across the ocean with a metronomic every-four-years cadence, engraved into me a deep fear of change.  Transitions, farewells, and endings all cause me deep discomfort and often tears.  This truth is an essential part of who I am (and I know I’m not alone in this).

A couple of weeks ago in a yoga class, I realized something new about myself and transitions.  As I moved through a sun salutation, the poses as familiar as a long-known language, my breath carrying me like a stream, it occurred to me:

The transition between poses is as important as the stillness within them.

I’ve been practicing yoga, with varying degrees of regularity and commitment, for over 13 years.  And for every one of the thousands of practices those years have held I’ve thought that what I was learning was a lesson about stillness, about holding, about enduring, about breath.

And of course I was learning that.  I’ve learned so much about those things – mostly, about abiding, with myself and others – both in class and in my life.  But suddenly that day I saw, with a flash of insight that almost embarrassed me because it was so obvious, that the moving between those poses that I held was equally as important.  I’ve always liked the vinyasa part of yoga, probably because the being still is so hard for me.  But if I’m honest, “liking it” has manifested mostly as moving quickly through the poses, and I realize that is not the point of the vinyasa.  Instead I need to pay equally close attention as I move my body, my breath, and my mind, up and down and around and through.

I need to honor the transitions just as I do the holding.

I’m sure it’s not an accident that this realization comes right as I feel I stand on the threshold of another transition with my children.  They are so incredibly lovely right now, so full of the golden life that is, to me, childhood incarnate.  And yet I see the end of these days like the storm clouds we watched on the horizon as we drove to Storyland (I hope not for the last time).  I know something else wonderful exists on the other side of that horizon, I promise I do – my own childhood of goodbyes taught me that – but I still dread the change.

And yet.  And so.  The lessons keep coming.  Breathing, breathing, into another transition.

 

They went really fast

We spent several days last week at my parents’ house by the ocean.  It was a wonderfully fluid kaleidoscope of activities and groups; we all wheeled through various permutations from all together to alone.  It was just a lovely few days.

About halfway through, Grace and I were walking alone and talking.  “We still have three days here,” I told her.  “Isn’t that great?”

“Oh, yes,” she sighed and grabbed my hand.  I adore that both of my children still hold my hand when we walk down the street. We admired the range of hydrangea colors at the next house we passed.  And then Grace said, “You know, it does feel like we have been here a long time already.”  I nodded.  “But also not long at all.”

“I know what you mean.”

“When you’re in them, days take a long time.  But then when you look back they went really fast.”  We walked for a few steps.  “Do you know what I mean, Mummy?”  She looked at me, and I stared back into my own brown eyes, blinking back tears.

“Yes, Grace.  I know exactly what you mean.”

 

Early morning at Walden

Last week Grace and Whit weren’t in any camps, because of the 4th of July and our plan to spend the second half of the week with my sister and family (just back from Jerusalem) at my parents’ house on the ocean.  So we had a couple of unscheduled days to play with.  One morning we went, early, to Walden Pond.  That raw March morning when the three of us walked around the pond was almost a year and a half ago.  It is a day that they both still refer to.  It’s funny how that decision, made on a whim, to seek out the quiet of Walden and to trust that my children would respond to its calm yielded one of our most enduring recollections.  A reminder that for me at least it is hard to predict which moments will crystallize into cherished memories, turned over in our minds like touchstones in our pockets, worn smooth with caressing.

We woke to a clear blue early July morning and headed immediately west, hoping to beat the crowds that I know swarm Walden Pond on warm days.  Arriving just before 8, we were almost alone.  The children immediately walked into the water, marveling at how clear it was, and how warm.  All three of us ducked under the first line and swam out, noticing that the water quickly grew darker, debating why this was.  It got deep quickly, Grace noticed.  And it did.  After a bit of a swim we turned around and returned to where they could stand.

Then they played in the shallows chasing schools of almost translucent yellow fish.  Their laughter rang in the quiet air.  I hung back and watched them, hearing Thoreau in my head.  I almost called the children over to quote the famous lines, to make sure they understood the importance of the place we stood.  And then I caught myself.  I didn’t need to point it out to them.  They knew.  They know.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.