everyday life

On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure.  We drove about an hour north to the beach.  The day was magical.  It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds.  I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light.  The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds.  You just have to look.

We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted.  Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so.  We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides.  We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean.  Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again.  He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.

Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded.  They jumped in the waves, holding hands.  I watched, fighting tears.

Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide.  Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it.  They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand.  No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end.  But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next.  May we trust the tides.

As I thought back over the summer of 2011, I revisited my reflections on the summer of 2010 and on the summer of 2009.  As usual, I was struck by the simultaneous sense that those months were decades ago and just yesterday.  This was a rich and happy summer, though marbled with the melancholy that I now know is an inextricable part of my life.

The beginning of summer, with its trip to Princeton reunions and half marathon, feels like a distant memory.  June rained and rained and rained, and then the sun finally came out for our week in Marion with Hilary and her girls.  Matt’s parents sold the house he grew up in, and officially are no longer Vermont residents.  This was bittersweet for all.

The fourth of July held its usual fireworks and small-town parade, with the extra bonus of getting to spend it with our cousins.

My mother injured herself and spent a lot of July and August recuperating, which was unexpected.  Her indomitable spirit prevailed, though, and she impressed every single person she encountered with her positive attitude.  I acquainted myself in a new way with the middle place, never more than one night when my daughter cried to me that I wasn’t spending enough time with her because I was with my own mother too much.  I anticipate this getting more tender, and more frayed, as I move forward, not less.

July included a wonderful visit to dear friends on Martha’s Vineyard, our annual overnight hike in the White Mountains, a rainbow cake, and swimming, sunsets, and star-gazing.

Grace went to my beloved former summer camp for 10 days, which began in tears (because she didn’t want me to go) and also ended in them (because she didn’t want to leave camp).

Whit went to Nature Camp and adored it.  It was without a doubt his favorite camp of the summer.  The kids wore name tags made out of rounds of wood and spent their days “ponding” and “bugging” (the latter sounds particularly charming to me).  He couldn’t get enough.  Unfortunately this camp was an hour away in each direction, so for each of the three days he went I spent four hours in the car.

Grace is an outstanding swimmer- we’re talking laps of butterfly, flip turns, etc.  She’s much better than I am.  I have no idea where this came from.  She refuses, however, to think about joining a swim team.  I suspect that my lack of interest in competition of the sporting kind has lived through another generation, for better or for worse.  Probably worse.

I read lots of stuff, but the books that moved me the most were Falling Apart in One Piece and Just Kids.  I also went through (and am still in) an enormous Stanley Kunitz phase.  Wow.  He says, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world” and I nod and cry at the same time.

I participated in Susannah Conway’s August Break, sharing photographs instead of words.  It was a lovely change of pace.

We went back to Legoland and it was every bit as wonderful as last year.  Different, of course, but equally special, joyful, and memorable.

One of my college roommates celebrated her wedding over Labor Day.  We did a bridesmaid flash mob dance (a youtube training video before the weekend, a rehearsal over the weekend, etc) and shocked and delighted the bride, who is an avid and excellent dancer.  It was so much fun!  The weekend was an extraordinary celebration with women who’ve meant the world to me for almost 20 years.  It was also an important reminder for me of where I came from and of who I am.

I think I finally started flossing.  For real!  I know.  How tragic that this merits inclusion here.  But it does.  I also experimented with a week-long cleanse (without dairy, sugar, gluten, refined anything, meat, soy, caffeine, alcohol) which surprised me, frankly, by being hugely informational and profoundly empowering.  I’m not going to live without some of those things, but I suspect I’d feel a lot better if I cut back on others of them.

I took Grace and Whit for a final summer adventure to the beach north of Boston last week, and we had an entirely magical day together.  It was intensely bittersweet, but I’m so glad we did it.

Another season turned to its end.  On Monday night, the night before the first day of school, Whit cried at bedtime.  He told me he doesn’t want to get older, doesn’t want to stop being 6, doesn’t want to go into 1st grade.  How to respond to this, so vivid a reminder of my own rawest and deepest wound?  I don’t know.  I just hugged him, kissed his forehead, told him I knew and I loved him, that that I believed it would keep getting better.  Then he pulled on his favorite red sweatband and went to bed.

I read about Carrie Newcomer’s song, Holy As a Day Is Spent, on Dominique Browning’s lovely blog Slow Love Life.  I’ve had the song on constant repeat for the last day and am hearing the lyrics over and over in my head.  The celebration of life’s ordinary divinity reminds me intensely of my reflections that everyday life is a practice and a poem.

Sometimes I think I focus overly on the practice part of the equation, on the relentless rhythm with which I trip and then, humbled, begin again.  Newcomer’s song made me think about all that is sacred in my life, the little things that I believe tend to hold the most holiness.  I didn’t sleep well last night at all, and I lay there thinking of some of those little things and moments, places where divinity lives in my ordinary life:

Running a washcloth over my son’s back, water sluicing over his wings

Wearing my mother’s wedding ring while she is in and out of medical care for an accident.  I look down at my right hand and see her ring and am filled with connection to her.  I wore her mother’s wedding right on my wedding day (she was my only grandparent who was no longer living, and not there) and am always reminded of that too.

The mumbled, mostly-asleep “I love you”s I get from the children when I tuck them in before I go to bed, pressing kisses to their foreheads, pulling the sheets up, closing my eyes and falling back, for a moment, through all the years of goodnights.

The sky, at all hours, in all weathers, in all seasons.  The way light, from a source beyond our knowing, streams through clouds.  The endless permutations of clouds, texture, and color that exist in the sky.  Watching weather roll in on the horizon.  For me, that is where divinity most surely lives.

A framed, handwritten copy of Yeats’ When You Are Old that Jessica gave to me on my 21st birthday which sits on my desk.

The way Grace and Whit notice birds in the backyard.  “Look, Mum, a cardinal!  A blue jay!”  Likewise, Grace’s mingled delight and worry (“will they be hit by a car?”) as a family of geese stroll across the major road in front of us.

My morning cup of coffee (now with rice milk and agave instead of milk and splenda).

Clean white sheets on my bed, where I often seek refuge surrounded by books, a darkened room, a fan blowing.

The tinkling notes of familiar lullabyes drifting through both Grace and Whit’s doors after they’ve gone to bed at night.

Folding laundry.  I love the smell of clean laundry, love the practice of smoothing out well-worn and well-known clothes, love creating neat piles out of a tangled basket..

Hydrangeas on the kitchen island, freshly cut from our front bushes.

The pink shell, decorated with drawings and splotches of sequins, that Whit gave me.  I have it on the windowsill of of my office so I see it a hundred times every day, each time I turn to look out the window at my tree.

Tell me, where do you find holiness in your life?