everyday life

Full of magic

Last Thursday morning we dropped Grace off at sleep-away camp (is it sleepover camp, or sleep away camp, and is there a hyphen?  I cannot figure this out) for 10 days.  Her anxiety about going had been mounting for the week or two prior to July 21st, and I was expecting some tears, and then some fireworks, at bedtime that last night.

Instead, she was calm, and quiet, though visibly sad.  We read several extra pages of Harry Potter, with Grace curled up close to me, rapt as we heard Hagrid’s story of his summer tangling with the giants.  I stopped reading after our normal amount, she looked at me with saucer eyes, endlessly deep and shining with tears, and I didn’t even say a word before turning back to the book to finish the chapter.

Then I took her to her room, and tucked her in.  I lay next to her on her narrow pink bed, as I do many nights.  “Sing me your favorite song from camp, Mummy,” she asked.  And so I did, whispering Christopher Robin to her, our heads leaning together, foreheads almost touching.  She had to have been breathing my breath as I sang.  I rubbed her back through her pajama top, singing the song twice through. When I was finished I heard her murmur, “I love you, Mummy.”

“It’s time for you to go now, isn’t it?”  she lifted her head up and looked at me.  I nodded.  My own eyes were glassy.  To miss ten days of this?  What was I thinking?  She swallowed and glanced over at her yellow and brown bears.  Then, back to me.  She nodded.  “Okay.”  She lay back down and twined her arms around my neck.  “I’m going to miss you,” she started to cry softly and I felt her tears on my skin.

“I’m going to miss you too, Gracie.”  I pressed a kiss to her forehead.  She pulled back to look at me.

“You will?”

“Oh, yes.  Grace,” I began, haltingly.  “One thing to remember is that you will be at camp, having all of these new experiences, new friends, and adventures.  Singing that song, for example!” A small giggle erupted out of her at that.  “And I’ll be here in my ordinary life.”

“Mum!”  Grace sat up suddenly.  Her cheeks shone in the dusk of her room, dark except for the light that slanted in from the hall.  Her voice was practically stern.  “Your life is not ordinary.  Your life is full of magic.”

Why, yes it is.

Halfway through

I’m stunned that we are already halfway through summer. This surprise is not unlike the way spring’s arrival startles me every year.  We round the curve to the Fourth of July, cheer at the wonderfully small-town-ish parade at my parents’ house, and suddenly things seem to move more quickly.  Grace is off to sleepaway camp tomorrow.  Whit is hitting tennis balls over the net with increasing regularity.  Everyone (but me) is getting blonder and tanner.

This is the full, hot, high noon of summer.  We have actually drifted past noon, I suspect.  A few images from the past weeks:
She wears her glasses everywhere.

There was much rejoicing when I told Grace and Whit that we are going back to Legoland.

This guy?  Makes me laugh. Every. Single. Day.  I try to let him pull me back from the melancholy that pulls at me like a tide.  Some days, that works.

A beautiful, peaceful walk on our last morning in Martha’s Vineyard.  Lighthouses, like maps, are an ordering theme for my whole life.

Whit got his own library card.

The kids and I made a rainbow cake.  I was reminded of how the chocolate cake for breakfast surprise blew their minds.  They are easily thrilled, these two, and I admit I consider that an excellent thing.  One of the things I want most for my children is that they remain open to moments of wonder, even – or especially – in the smallest details of life.

The annual overnight hike in NH was simply lovely, a respite from real life, a re-immersion in these two women, whom I love so dearly. who are my vital extended family.  The three of us hiked all the way up together, an experience that I adored both in reality and as metaphor.

And then there was a lot of laughing on the deck of the hut.  A whole lot.

And a stunning sunset that, of course, brought tears to my eyes and tapped me immediately back into the eternal, the divine, that which we can glimpse – if we believe in it – all around us at any time.  The truth is I see it in all of these photographs.

The summer of letting go

Letting go continues to be a theme in my life.  I think about what I wrote in December and it’s all still so true:

This letting go is releasing my white knuckle grip on the way I wanted my life to be.

It is EM Forester’s familiar words: “We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

It is also acknowledging that certain things are lost and other things will never be.

It is accepting, with a deep internal settling, the passage of time against which I rail so often and so furiously.

It is the sentence of Jack Kornfield’s, to which I return again and again with an instinct as rhythmic and powerful as the tide, its truth ineffably sad and profoundly uplifting at the same time:

To live is to die to how we wanted it to be.

But this summer there’s a new note in the chorus.   Whit is letting go, too.  Giving me no choice but to do so, and to watch him ascend, move away, stretch the raveling red string that ties his heart to mine.  First, there’s the lost tooth.  Oh, my aching heart.

This past weekend we visited friends on Martha’s Vineyard.  We spent most of Saturday at the beach.  At the end of the long dock there was a twisting slide that dropped off into the ocean.

It’s hard to convey how tiny he looked sitting at the top of this slide from the beach.  I walked down and stood by him as he deliberated, deciding whether to let himself go.  And, finally, without any announcement, he did.

(and yes, I swear I feed him)

The week before we went to the Vineyard, I’d enrolled Whit in a neighborhood camp around the corner.  He knew exactly zero people there.  And on the first day, I signed him in, watched him make a name tag, and then stood with him at the corner of the playground.  “Are you ready for me to go?”  I asked him.

He looked up at me, indicating I should crouch down so that he could whisper something to me.  “Yes.  See you later.  I love you.”

And then away I went.  With a few glances over my shoulder, to witness this.

He is tall and lean and looks like a full-blown boy, his hair is bleaching quickly to summer blond, his smile is now crooked, and he’s reading early readers about rockets and bugs.  It’s all blurring in front of my eyes because it’s moving so damn fast.  Like an invocation, I chant silently to myself: let go, let go, let go.

But still he still sleeps with his Beloved wrapped in his arms.  Still.

Fireworks

Last Friday night was the annual fireworks display in Marion.  For a number of reasons I was having one of those evenings where I felt like Grace and Whit were the only true, steady things in my life.  We walked down to the dock at the end of the street to watch the fireworks hand in hand.  Whit has this new thing he does when he’s walking and holding my hand, where he turns my wrist to his face and kisses it.  He kept doing that, so often that I felt my heart expanding in my chest, filling (some of) the space that had felt so echoingly, clangingly empty just moments ago.

We sat and watched the fireworks. The show ended and everyone around me stood up to go, but I sat and watched the wisps of smoke in the sky.  Where there had been flashes of brilliant light, now there were traces of faint grayness, fading gradually to black.  The space held the memory of what had been, but tenuously, and only if you paid attention.

Grace tapped my shoulder and looked down at me.  “Are we going to go?”  I stared up at her, at her angular face, so full of her galloping years, and I blinked.  She looked confused, wondering, no doubt, what I was doing.  Shaking my head, stunned at the traces of babyhood that were still, but barely, visible in her face, I got to my feet.

We walked slowly back to the house, Grace holding my hand.  Whit was walking with Matt, and they and my parents and other people moved near us but I felt like Grace and I were alone in the world.  She gripped my hand and I glanced over at her head, her braids messy from a day in and out of the water, and noticed that it is at my shoulder now.  “Will you always watch the fireworks with me, Mummy?”  She spoke quietly.

“Yes, Grace, of course.”  I dropped her hand to squeeze her shoulders against my chest, marveling at how solid she seems, when she used to be so birdlike.  “Until you don’t want me to, of course,”  I laughed.  “Like when you’re a teenager.”  I smiled at her but she was looking straight forward with a scowl on her face.

A beat passed and we walked in the full-blown summer evening, hydrangeas everywhere.  “I don’t want to be a teenager, Mummy,” she said firmly.  I looked over at her, surprised.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t.  It’s going too fast.”  She stopped walking and faced me.

What I said next surprised me.  “Grace, you know how right now you are so excited about summer, and then at the end of summer you are ready for it to be over, and to go back to school?”  She nodded.  “And remember how at the beginning of December Christmas is so exciting, and then by the time it’s New Year’s you just want to pack away all the decorations and start back to regular life?”  She nodded again, but clearly wondered where I was going.  “The point is,” I said, swallowing as I realized where I was going.  “Everything happens at just the right time.  I promise.”  My eyes welled with tears.  Do I even believe this?  I don’t know.

“No.”  She looked right at me, her own eyes glassy, wet.  “I don’t ever want to lose you.”  I wrapped my arms around her and she buried her face in my chest.  I could feel tears through my thin cotton t-shirt.

“You won’t ever lose me, Grace.  You won’t.”  I closed my eyes and saw the gray streak of where the fireworks had been against the night sky, heard the whisper of moments that had passed, said a silent thanks for the fact that I can see the vestiges of smoke that remain after the showy brightness of life’s fireworks.

Happy Fourth of July

Home from a long weekend with my whole family (other than my wonderful brother-in-law).  We had a very windy sail, a birthday, a whole lot of laughter and a few tears, a lost tooth, ice cream and fireworks.

Back tomorrow.