everyday life

Summer 2012

As I thought about the summer of 2012, I thought back to my reflections on the summer of 2011, 2010, and 2009.  This is my favorite season, though also one heavy with melancholy.  I noted last year that the only seasonal change I don’t lament, on some level, is winter to spring.  Because after that I’m aware that we are turning towards the end, the darkness, the cold.  There comes a moment in each summer when I sense fall underneath all the sun and heat and laughter; usually it’s somewhere in the end of July.  And then comes August, an elegaic season that is at once the fullest manifestation of summer and its end.

This summer was full of joys.  I saw first-hand the power of tradition.  Certain events are now carved into our family life as important rituals.  We started off by going to Storyland on the last day of school.  The kids are getting old for Storyland, but they love the tradition as much as I do, and embrace the way it marks the beginning of summer vacation.

Grace was recovering from her broken collarbone in June, so Matt and Whit went alone on the fifth-annual White Mountains overnight trip.  We visited our dear friends in Martha’s Vineyard and had a wonderful, albeit short weekend.  Grace went back to sleep-away camp and loved it, cementing her bond with my best friend from camp’s daughter.  I don’t have words to express what it’s like to watch this second-generation friendship flower.

We spent the Fourth of July with my family, happily welcoming home my sister, her husband, and her daughters from Jerusalem.  We watched the parade, played in the back yard, swam out to the raft, and jumped off the boat into the ocean.  It was a very, very happy week.

The summer wasn’t all re-treads of previous years, though.  That’s the beauty of rituals, I think: they are a framework around which you can build lots of new experiences.  Several times, Grace, Whit, and I woke up early and went to Walden Pond to swim.  Each time we were among the only people there, in a place whose magic is palpable to both the children and me.

Around Memorial Day we started the License Plate Game.  We wanted to see all 50 state license plates.  I printed out a list, put it on the fridge, and the children got really into it.  We were down to four by the beginning of August, and we knocked three of those (Hawaii, Nebraska, and Wyoming) out in California.  Alaska eludes us as of this writing.

We listened to a lot of Phillip Phillips’ Home, and the Mumford & Sons cover of The Boxer, and Katy Perry’s Wide Awake, and Willie Nelson singing Coldplay’s The Scientist, and to a few songs from the soundtrack of Brave.

I read a lot.  I absolutely adored Wild by Cheryl Strayed, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, and The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.  These three are among the most lovely books I’ve read in a long time.  I also loved The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith, I Couldn’t Love You More by Jillian Medoff, Light Years by James Salter, Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian.  I read lots of other books, mostly fiction.

We are deep in the happy hours, as Glenda Burgess wrote in her gorgeous memoir The Geography of Love.  I know these hours won’t last forever, and I am trying to sink as deeply into them as I can.  One thing I know is I can’t make them stay, so at least let me pay attention to them while they’re here.

 

 

Making room for new growth

Late last week I finally went out to the front yard and dead-headed the hydrangeas.  The gorgeous blooms from a couple of weeks ago had faded and drooped.  The bushes looked tired, laden with the clusters of paled and slightly-brown flowers at their base.  I clipped and clipped, filling an entire trash can.  When I was finished I had a full trash can full of fading beauty.

It was hard not to be overcome with the metaphor: to make room for new blooms, I had to cut way back on the existing ones.  The existing ones, which were not at their peak anymore but were still very beautiful.  I had to go in and clear space.  Clear out what was beginning to fade in order to allow for what was not yet visible.

Isn’t that what we all have to do, all the time?  It takes faith, doesn’t it, to cut away what we know is good, even though we understand that it is past its prime, in favor of what we cannot yet see?  And yet we must.  What is coming is beautiful.  I know it is.

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.