everyday life

I am still here.  I hope you are too.  This is a strange, echoing, eerie time, one of lamentation and hope, one of fear and frustration, one that is, for me, about most of all a profound confrontation with the unknown.  I really don’t have anything to say.  But I want to be here.  I’m hungrily devouring anything anyone’s sharing about their experience of this time out of time. I’m curious about what you’re feeling, thinking, reading, eating.  We are all at home, and I am certain that in the future one of the themes of writing about this time will be empty nesters suddenly finding themselves with full nests again.

That is surely the silver lining of this, if there is one: prodigious amounts of family time.  Both Grace and Whit have classes most days (but not all) and they are doing a good job managing their schedules.  I am adamantly not a homeschooler and I feel grateful that they are old enough to handle this themselves.  Both Matt and I are working at home.  I quipped in the first week that I must be one of the only people experiencing this quarantine as MORE people in their office.  I have three other people in my office all day, every day.  It’s noisier and messier than I’m used to.  We are going through food and laundry at a record pace.

And we are so replete with blessings, I know that.  There are more ways than I can possibly count that this could be worse.  So far the four of us, and my mother, who lives nearby and with whom we are practicing social distancing but still in close touch, are all safe.  We are able to work from here.  I am so, so lucky.  We all know it.  I even had a moment last week of knowledge that there will come a time when I miss these days.  I told Matt and about it and he laughed at me because it was such a classic thing to say.  That’s just how I live in this world: shadowed always by the anticipation of loss and of missing.  But I tried to channel that into being here now.

It’s not easy.  I feel a huge amount of fear.  What does this mean, in every way?  What will the world look like “after”?  Will there even BE an after?  I am buoyed by my close friends and family and actually feel MORE in touch with a lot of people than I have in a long time.  But every day, multiple times a day, the questions start to come.  They wake me up in the middle of the night.  There is so much that is unknown, and that’s always been the hardest thing for me.

So I don’t have a neat message here.  I don’t have anything specific I want to say.  I would love to hear what’s on your mind, your kindle, your TV, your heart, your table.  I really would.  Stay safe.  Stay home.

A couple of Fridays ago, Matt and I had something to do in the evening.  I know!  Unusual in and of itself.  But that’s not my point.  It was the end of a week of rain (after seemingly months of rain in Boston).  It had been cold and rainy all day long, and I knew the evening’s celebration (for the retirement of one of Whit’s favorite teachers) was under a tent.  I felt not a little bit of dread.

Then, around 5, it began to clear.  It actually turned into a spectacular evening.  As we were driving Whit to a friend’s house on the way to the school, I marveled to Whit that it had turned to so lovely.

“And it is that way even though everything is wet, and despite having been such a yucky day,” Whit observed from the back seat.

I laughed to myself, realizing something for the first time.

“See, I actually think it’s more beautiful because everything is wet, and because it was so ugly earlier.”

I glanced back to see that he was looking at the window.

Maybe this is what midlife is.  Realizing that the rain and the storms make the clear skies that much more beautiful?  Knowing you can’t have one without the other. The glory and the grit, the sunshine and the rain, the love and the loss.  Flips of the same coin.  And, truthfully, each enriching the other in ways I have only begun to understand.

I like this definition of life in the middle: knowing that the light is beautiful because of the dark, not in spite of it.

Photo is from later that evening.  Grandeur all the more lovely because of the nasty day that preceded it.

I have a word of the year.  I have updates.  December – and this entire fall – has been a lot more eventful than I had expected, or, frankly, hoped.  But first, today, on this holiday, I wanted to remember some of what happened during Grace and Whit’s long break.  By December 14th they were both home.  We enjoyed a bunch of time as a family.  There were also some tears, some pouting, and some yelling.  But mostly, the good way outweighed the bad.  And as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much my goal for life.  I know by now you can’t insulate yourself from the bad without insulating yourself from the good, and I have no interest in the latter, so I won’t even try the former.

Hence.  Skinless life.  A fair amount of heartache. And an awful lot of joy!

We bought our tree with little fanfare, no arguing, and, apparently, no measuring.  It was a little smaller than usual, but it was lovely.  We decorated it with my dearly beloved cousin and her husband, a tradition I’ve come to cherish.

We attended the wedding of our favorite babysitter of many years.  It was an honor to be there, and was a supremely fun evening, with tangible love in the air and much family dancing.

We listened to and sang along to a lot of country.  Our family playlist the last several weeks – which Grace actually made – includes Blue Tacoma by Russell Dickerson, Get Along by Kenny Chesney, I Lived It and I’ll Name the Dogs by Blake Shelton, and Knee Deep by the Zac Brown Band.

Grace and I went to holiday tea at a formal club in Boston, for the second year in a row.  Last year we went with Matt’s mother, and this year neither grandmother could join us.  So we went the two of us, and it was one of my favorite moments of the whole holiday season.  Wonderful.

We enjoyed our annual Christmas Eve tradition: church, dinner with my mother and old friends with excellent wine and carols.  This was the first year we’ve done it without my Dad (we were together last year but the evening was very different: takeout Chinese.  Mum was a week out of her hip transplant) and his absence was felt keenly, but we all appreciated being together.

Grace drove us basically everywhere.

We celebrated Christmas Day with my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nieces.  It was lovely bedlam followed by a long stretch of quiet.  We had Triscuit Treats for Christmas lunch standing around our kitchen island (a long-time family favorite with a complicated recipe: Triscuits, a small square of cheddar, and either pepperoni or a jalapeno on top, in the toaster oven.  you’re welcome).  And then we gathered again all together for dinner, and laughed hard.

We ran family stadiums one morning.  It was cold and clear at the Harvard Stadium, and Dad and Grace spanked Whit and me.

We enjoyed a marvelous couple of days in western Massachusetts with my mother, my sister, and her family.  We went to Mass MOCA, Mum and I went to the Clark (I loved the Clark), we had a terrific breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  It was really lovely.  The photo above, my favorite of the past little bit, was taken right before we left Lenox.

We played family tennis.  The pattern of the last couple of years, where whatever team I’m on loses, continued.  Whit and I lost the first set, and Matt and I lost the second.  We laughed a lot.

It was really, really good.  We are really, really lucky.  Onward.

This was the hardest summer of my life.  It was also the quietest and the fastest, and those things (hard, quiet, fast) all feel opposed. But they coexisted, reminding me yet again that life is about contrast and contradiction and that just as soon as we think we have things figured out they shift again.

In addition, amid all the irritation, crankiness, and sorrow, there were, moments of great beauty. Already the specifics of this summer’s difficulties are fading into a generalized memory of snappiness, tears, and frustration.  This reminds me of how, so long ago, I described my experience of the first months of motherhood:

It’s fascinating the way the mind recovers and copes, isn’t it? My memory has smoothed over those weeks of tears and panic like the airbrush facility in photoshop: the pain is still there, I can’t forget it, but its pointy, prickly granularity is sanded down to a more general, uniform memory.

I definitely want to remember the bright moments, of which there were many. Isn’t it interesting that while the difficulties fade away into a generalized slurry, the joyful memories can sometimes become more brilliant, crystallizing somehow as they solidify into our recollection?  Maybe this too is its own coping mechanism.  Some of the highlights of the summer included:

We had a marvelous visit with my sister Hilary and her family

Grace and I made a last minute decision to go see Taylor Swift in concert (the uncharacteristic nature of that decision was part of what made the evening so wonderful) and it was great fun

Matt, Grace and I drove to the Cape to visit Whit and we had a great lunch

Matt and I spent a day on the Cape together before attending Cup Night at Whit’s camp

We played family doubles and swam to the line at the beach many times as a twosome, a threesome, and a foursome

Grace, Matt and I went to spinning (Grace and I in our matching camo leggings)

Whit and Grace took out Little Brea, the boat donated to the yacht club after gifts in my father’s memory and named for the boat he and my mother sailed for 20 years (see photo above)

Grace and I went to the MFA one rainy Saturday and loved seeing the pastels as well as the American art

I went for my first sail without my Dad, which was emotional but lovely

But when I reflect on the summer, I realize the time that stands out the most for me are the weeks that bracketed Summer with a capital “S,” early June and late August.  The weeks we were at home, the four of us, with not a lot else going on. They were the most ordinary of weeks.  We played family Hearts and went for walks for ice cream and watched movies that made us laugh (The Heat was the funniest, and we’re still quoting it).  They were also the sweetest.  I struggled with the last week or two, overwhelmed as I often get with This Is The Last – the anxiety of the endings and of the pending transition swamped me. I may write more about that.  But still, what I recall about those last ordinary weeks is how wonderful they were.  And now: into the next season, with barely time to take a breath.  Onward.