everyday life

Hurtling towards the end

We are now hurtling towards the end of the year, towards the end that exists at the midpoint of a year.  I wrote about it last week.  Both the calendar and the natural world speak of fullness, of the bright, raucous beginnings of the most swollen season of the year.  And yet everything in me aches with endings right now.  Why am I am so finely tuned to this cadence whose beat I cannot hear but nevertheless feel undeniably in my bloodstream?

The flowers of early spring – peonies, rhododendrons, countless others whose names I do not know – are all brown and faded, either drooping from trees or already fallen and ground into mush on the pavements.  Every day I seem to walk through another puddle of brightness on the sidewalk, underneath another tree that has let its petals go under the weight of too much lush beauty.

The tree outside my window is now dense with leaves.  They have transitioned from the first, tentative shoots of bright green to the deep, shiny green color that will fill my window until mid August.  Last week people in caps and gowns swarmed around my town, and Grace and Whit and I had the same conversation we had the year before about academic regalia, about the orange hood I wore when I graduated from business school, about how isn’t it hard to keep those flat hats on your head?

School ends this week, and I know that event is the central note of the painful drumbeat of farewell to which every day is set.  As I did last year, I will take my tear-stained face and camera full of photographs of my children in white and escape immediately to Storyland.  We will hide out in a place that means a lot to all three of us.  A place where I say yes.  A place where magic blunts the loss that limns every moment.  I don’t know many more years Grace and Whit will be charmed by Storyland’s small rides and fairytale attractions, but as long as they are, I will take them.

I can’t run away from the endings, but I can at least take myself – and my children – to a place where for a bit we forget about the closure of another chapter, about the turning forward of our time on earth.  Of course when I’m there, I have to try not to wonder if this will be the last time.  My deep and fundamental awareness of life’s transience comes with me no matter where I go.  The challenge is to not let it overshadow the moments of extraordinary joy.  Like when I hear Grace and Whit squeal with delight at the gate of Storyland.  So I won’t.

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway

It seems like the world is composed of those people who break bones and those who do not.  I’m the former, and my husband is the latter.  At this point Grace seems to fall in my camp.  I’ve been thinking a lot in the last week about what it means to be broken, and then to heal.  I do realize that not everything in life is a metaphor – sometimes a cold is just a cold, a friend told me once – but this one is hard to avoid.

As scars speak of wounds we have suffered and healed from, so too do our bones bear the marks of our journey, our falls and our recoveries.  The big difference, of course, is that bones, when healed, are invisible to the naked eye.  That means that my body is full of healed breaks, bones that have reset themselves, grown back together, not as perfect as before, not as straight, but (as of now) solid

I am easily broken.  And yet I have always, so far, healed.  It’s hard not to ponder why it is that some of us are more breakable than others.  Did Grace somehow inherit my predisposition towards breaking?  It wouldn’t be the only difficult legacy of mine she’s received.  Am I weak?  I often feel that way, there’s no question: fragile is one of the words I would use first to describe myself.  But as I think about this more it occurs to me that this is perhaps just a physical manifestation of my emotional and spiritual orientation towards the world.  Maybe my bones simply echo the way my heart is easily broken, by all the gorgeousness and pain it witnesses every day.  Maybe I don’t know any other way to be, deep down in my core, in the very marrow of my self, than vulnerable to breaking.

I understand that there is great pain in breaking, but I also have to believe there is much to learn.  At the very least it makes me appreciate being whole.  And of course it fills me with awe, the idea that bones, the scaffolding on which our entire bodies hang, can knit themselves back together.  The analogy this offers for life itself is compelling to me, and inspiring. I hope that if Grace did inherit my propensity for breaking she also can see the beauty in this way of life.

Have you broken a lot of bones?  Do you think that makes a person weak?

 

 

 

Undeniably about endings

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

A repost from last year, and very much how I am feeling right now.  I’m in New Hampshire with our extended family, the other two legs of the stool, for the now-traditional Memorial Day in New Hampshire.  Back tomorrow.

It’s always worth it to play

Saturday was an absolutely perfect day.  Cloudless sky, 75 degrees.  I took Whit to soccer and then he and I joined Matt on the sidelines of Grace’s game.  She had only been on the field for a few minutes when she took a simply heroic fall.  She literally went flying through the air before crumpling to the ground on her left shoulder.  There was an audible gasp.  And then, worse, she was slow to get up.  All the players on the field sank to their knees.  I watched her coach approach and ask her if she wanted to keep playing, watched her shake her head, and watched her walk off the field next to him with her head bowed.  I purposely didn’t rush over to where she sat with her coaches and team on the other side of the field.  I felt like I should stay out of the way.

But at half time, Matt and I went over, and Grace was in quiet tears, holding a tiny bag of ice to her shoulder (one of her teammates had scooped a few ice cubes out of her water bottle and put them into the bag that had held the snack apples, a detail that charmed me).  I immediately announced I was going to take her to the ER for x-rays and neither coach fought me.  Yes, that makes sense, they nodded.  The whole way to the hospital, she cried softly.

After a long wait they finally put us into a room and I helped Grace change into a johnny and lie down on the gurney.  “Will you lie with me, Mummy?” she asked plaintively, and I did.  I curled my body around hers and rested my chin on top of her gold-streaked brown hair.  She whimpered quietly, and I could tell she was in a lot of pain.

“You’ve broken bones too, right, Mummy?” she said suddenly and I smiled in spite of myself.  For years and years I’ve maintained that if you haven’t broken any bones you’re “not trying hard enough.”  This is an obnoxious thing to say, I realize, and I think mostly I’m trying to explain to myself why I’ve broken one ankle, one arm (both bones, both compound fractures), three ribs, and assorted fingers and toes.

“Yes.  I’ve broken a lot of bones.  Unfortunately I think getting hurt is part of the deal.  It’s going to happen sometimes when you do sports.  I’m pretty sure there will be more injuries to come in other games.  And in general, in life.”  I hesitated.  “But I promise,” I blinked back the tears that sprang to my eyes.  “I promise you it’s always worth it to play.”

We lay there quietly for a while.  Then it was time for x-rays.  She was very freaked out by being alone in the dark room, by the lead apron, and by the big machine aimed at her shoulder.  By the time we were finished there she was weeping in my arms again.

Then we went back to the room and onto the gurney.  It was quiet in the ER on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and I could hear our breathing.  “Mummy, you know what?”  Grace turned her head slowly to look at me.  “This is like when I had something in my eye the other day.”  (After a protracted effort to get an eyelash out of her eye, she had been in real pain for hours; my guess is that she somehow scratched her eyeball).  “You know, I realize how much I’ve been taking for granted all along.”

I tried hard not to cry.  I looked right in her mahogany eyes, nodding, biting my lip.  I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.

That night when I tucked her in her arm was propped on a pillow pet and her eyes were wary.  She was very worried about rolling over and injuring herself more in her sleep.  I smoothed her hair back from her forehead and kissed her cheek, murmuring again how proud I was of her and how brave she had been.

“Mummy, I just want to say thank you again.” With her good arm, she clutched her teddy bear to her chest as she spoke.

“Why, Grace?”

“Thank you for being there with me all day.  For always being with me.”  Her eyes brimmed and mine did too.  I hugged her because I didn’t have words to express what I wanted to say.  Which is that there’s nowhere I want to be but right here with her.  That I don’t want to miss a single second of this season of my life, or of hers.

 

 

A blur of white petals

I’ve often noted that I believe insight is everywhere, as long as you remain open to it.  I’m defiantly not an intellectual snob: recall my discussion of something I saw in Glamour magazine.

Lately, it’s the tree on a residential street that is near the end of my run.  This isn’t the first time things I’ve noticed something on a run that has made my think.  Maybe this is a series: seasonal reflections while running.  In winter, I was struck by the difference sunlight made.  One side of the street, in shadow, was crusted with ice and snow.  The other was wet, water flooding down the pavement.  Nothing took away the substance – water – but the power of light changed its form entirely.  Like inquiry, like honest discussion, I thought: in its light, things we fear lose their grip.

Last week I ran in the rain.  The world had a quality of light that I associate with a spring rain: clear, but vaguely pink-tinted, everything even crisper and more itself than usual.  I had to duck through the branches of the tree I mentioned because it was so heavy with white petals, soggy with water.  For blocks after I brushed through the branches, white petals flew off me as I ran.  The tree – and the world – was literally heavy with beauty, so replete with excess gorgeousness that it shed onto me, spread itself everywhere.  I kept hearing Kate Chopin in my head: “Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”

A few days later the rain had dried and as I rounded the corner I saw that many of the petals had fallen off the tree.  I didn’t have to duck anymore; the tree, while still fulsomely dotted with white petals, had sprung back to the shape I was accustomed to.  I glanced down as my feet slipped, though, and noticed the sidewalk was a blur of white petals.

Beauty – physical, experiential, emotional – is evanescent.  Drink it in, and fling the petals all around you, while you can.