everyday life

Three Scenes

Deep thoughts I do not have right now.  The weekend found me oddly discombobulated and tired; I feel lately like I’m not entirely inside my own body.  Or maybe I’m too much inside my own head and not enough inside my body.  Maybe this is just a towards-the-solstice fog.  In lieu of anything substantial, I can offer three scenes from my regular little life.

This summer, while flying to Legoland:

Whit, folded over, examining the bottom of his seat between his own legs, “This is for flotation?”

“Yes, Whit,” I said.

“But only for if we land on water, right?” Still bent over, he was now using his hands to explore under his own seat.  I thought of Kara and how she’d have the Purell ready.

“Yes, Whit.  Only on water.  If we crash on land, well, you don’t need your seat cushion for flotation.”

Grace, sitting by the window and reading Percy Jackson so intently I had no idea she was listening to us, pipes up, without looking up from her book, “That’s always what I have thought. Better to land on water.”

“That’s a good thing to have an opinion on, Grace,” I looked at her, startled.  She didn’t even glance up from the page.  All I could think of was Robert Frost’s iconic poem “Fire and Ice,” and I wondered in what universe my seven year old has thought through what surface she would prefer her plane to crash on.

****

Walking upstairs from dinner, this week:

“Barbies are so lame,” Grace says, her voice tinged with a performative disdain.  She knows how I feel about Barbie.  She glances over her shoulder, looking for my reaction.  I smile and nod, urging her and Whit both up the stairs with my eyes.  Why does it take so long, this final ascent?  “They can’t even stand up on those feet,” she said, and I stifle a giggle.  At least when she’s not wearing her stilettos, she can’t.  So true.

“Barbies are also always losing their heads,” offers Whit, from his spot above us on the Everest of the stairs.  (of course he helps this loss along, enjoying the loud “pop!” Barbie heads make when they are snapped off, but still … inadvertently funny).

****

Before bed, last week:

It had been raining and I had not been able to run my children like dogs after school at the park (which is my usual parenting approach).  They were incredibly hyper and wired and annoying before bed.  So I asked them to do 100 jumping jacks each.  And they did.

Tea with the High Mistress

Though I live mere blocks from the house I was born in, the story of my childhood isn’t that simple.  My family hopscotched around the globe, from Cambridge to Paris to Cambridge to London and back to Cambridge.  There were enormous gifts and privileges from this childhood, some immediately obvious and others that took longer to manifest.  There were also costs, which have mostly been in the longer-flowering category.  When Michael Ondaatje writes “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” I nod my head mutely, tears running down my face.  Yes, yes I do.  I understand the sadness and beauty of a childhood spent in the pursuit of new geographies, of adventures and cathedrals and experiences.

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Pat Conroy’s words ring inside me too, with a painful familiarity.   In this flux of my childhood years there is an anchorage, a place I learned to hook the boat of my identity; I am from here, where I live now, but that’s not always been clear to me, and I’ve spent many pages, more hours, and even more tears trying to figure that out.  The only steadiness I knew as a child was change, and we moved with a fluidity as rhythmic and inorexable as the tides.  It’s no wonder that the ocean is an important metaphor for me now.  It’s also not a surprise that I’m anxious about farewells, haunted by the fear of abandonment, and terrified of ambiguity.

The point of this post, though, is the photograph above.  When Hilary and I lived in London we went to a school called St Paul’s Girls’ School.  It was an intimidating place, whose grand mahogany hall with a towering organ and black-and-white checkerboard marble floor still loom large in my memory.  The head of school was called the High Mistress, and she was a figure of authority and grandeur who inspired an admiration bordering on fear in her students.  We were supposed to curtsy when she walked by.  I’m not kidding.

Anyway, there was a tea recently with the current High Mistress in Cambridge.  I was sick at home with a fever, but Grace went with Mum.  Based on the photograph above (the High Mistress is in the middle), I’d say she’s almost ready to enroll?

Random thoughts on a gray Sunday

It has been a gray and raw weekend, and I’ve been hibernating a little bit.  The high drama of last week’s Lice In the Classroom development is abating.  I know.  It’s exciting around here.  It is indeed very glamorous to be me.  All I have today are a few random thoughts.

I recently bought this adorable journal, Just Between Us, to share with Grace.  We pass it back and forth, taking turns writing answers to the questions contained in the book.  I put it on her desk when I’m finished, and she puts it on my bedside table.  I already love the tradition and, maybe more importantly, she does too.  It’s a great way to communicate with a child of her age, and my thoughts are already turning to the years where keeping her talking to me will be my highest priority of all.

I enjoyed a quiet morning as Matt took the kids to the Science Museum.  I made Ina Garten’s peanut butter and jelly bars (delish) and edited another chapter of my manuscript.  This is cooking weather, as far as I’m concerned.  Tonight, butternut squash risotto with homemade chicken stock (an obsession of mine).  I’ve advertised it to Whit as “cheesy rice” – we’ll see if that sales pitch works.  I kind of doubt it.

The tree outside my office window is totally bare now.  Just a week ago it was ablaze in yellow leaves, the last gasp of nature as she flamed to her death.  I’m remembering, as I did almost exactly a year ago, other windows that have framed my experience.

This site, Damn you Auto Correct!, has made me guffaw more times than I can count this week.  Hilarious. Truly.  I highly recommend that you add it to your reader.

Christine’s blog post today got me thinking about the holidays.  Well, the shockingly early arrival of the Starbucks red cups and the sudden tidal wave of “gift guides” in the magazines I read helped too.

I’ve done most of my Christmas shopping already, with a hearty assist from Gift Lit.  Check it out!  You can buy 3, 6, or 12 month subscriptions to books for children of various ages and interests.  I may have just revealed what my godchildren and other precious children are receiving for Christmas, but I think it’s such a great idea I wanted to share it.

Also, if you are looking for personalized holiday gifts, look no further than Fontaine Maury – I’ve been a devout fan of the line for years, and at this point love looking at the drawing options and recognizing ones that I had commissioned for X or Y party or event.  The robot?  I adore.  The placemats, plates, water bottles, bookplates … all fantastic.

Finally, here is the drawing Grace made for me on Friday night when she, Whit and I met a friend of mine and her son for pizza.  What she wrote, totally unprompted, made me weep.

Thoughts like sparrows

Wednesday morning, early.  The sky was full of promise.  The clouds, the ever-lighter blue sky, all radiant as the sun bled over the horizon.  A sky of beginnings, of life, the kind of sky that, as I’ve said before, makes me believe in God.

Wednesday, mid-morning.  The ground a riot of yellow leaves, a blanket spread around the tree that they fell from.  A ground resplendent with endings, with the beauty of life flaming out, of a year drawing to a close.

Up and down, beginning and end, sky and ground.  These polarities exist in every single hour of every day for me.

This is not my favorite time of the year.  Darkness encroaches.  We are a day away from the turning back of the clocks, which for me marks the beginning of the cold stretch of the year when there is far more dark than light.  I’m filled with dread about the darkness, and I’m also walking with memories of the difficult weeks and months after Grace’s birth heavy on my shoulders.  As much as her birthday reminds me of the as-yet darkest season of my life, it also reminds me of the swift flight of the years.  I think, on balance, the latter is worse for me than the former.

I try to hang onto the inspiration and peace that so fill the morning sky, but it’s hard, when the days shift so quickly towards dusk and the sidewalks are muddy with wet, decaying leaves.  The black branches of bare trees form their nets against the gray sky, and there is poetry in their barrenness, but so, so many endings. 

I do have calm and peaceful thoughts, but they scatter like a flock of sparrows taking flight from those dark branches into the faded gray air.  In their wake, a faint current of air disturbed by the beating of their wings, a sense of sadness, of rawness.  Another season – fall, this year, my daughter’s eight year on earth, my eighth year as a mother – draws to a close. 

I’m moved enough by the morning sky, though, that it’s not all bleak.  There are strands of incandescent joy and beauty woven through this damp, dark time.  All over again, I am reminded of the inextricability of endings and beginnings, of death and life, and of the beauty that can exist in each.  Today it is Jack Kornfield’s words that are ringing in my head, over and over:

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

Good Night Moon, Spanish moss frost, and heart break

Last night Whit picked a book for me to read to him before bed, as he does every night.  Uncharacteristically, he brought me Goodnight Moon.  “A good night book,” he said, plopping into my lap.  He is tall and angular now, in a way that only Gracie used to be.  He curled up against me and I read Goodnight Moon to him, saying the words by heart.  He was quiet, unusually still, and when I was finished he whispered to me, “Can you read it again?”

Of course I did.  Rocking in the yellow chair that held me as I nursed two babies.  In the nursery that held Grace, exactly eight years ago.  The nights are long, as they were then, the the light feels limited, though full of feeling, emotion and elegy, when it is here.  I read Goodnight Moon again, voice cracking at parts, and I could tell Whit was exhausted because he lay limply against my chest, not looking up to wonder at my tearful voice.

I wondered if this was the last time I’d rock a child reading Goodnight Moon. I thought about how often we do something for the last time without knowing it; the importance of a moment, its heavy significance, is so often clear only in retrospect. I wonder if part of this is self-protection: if I knew every time something was a last, I don’t think I could bear it.  As it is, the possibility of that, the unavoidable truth of loss, hangs around every moment of my life, Spanish moss twining around the branches of my consciousness, falling in elegant loops that sometimes occlude the sun.  That is hard enough.

This morning the fields were covered in silver frost (the color of Spanish moss, in fact, which is what made me think of it).  It was really quite spectacular, and take-your-breath-away cold too.  Grace and Whit wanted to run across the field at school (see photo), marveling at their own footprints in the rime.  Leaving their marks.  I stood and watched them, wistful.  As we do every morning, Whit and I walked Grace to the 2nd grade playground.  We say goodbye to her always at the same point, at a remove far enough from her friends that Grace feels comfortable throwing herself into a real hug in my arms.

After watching her run towards her friends, her brand-new birthday backpack bright on her parka-ed back, Whit and I turned to walk back to his building.  He reached up and held my hand, his nubby woolen mitten curling around my fingers.

“Whit?” I said to him, leaning down.

“What?”

“I like that you still like to hold my hand.”

“I like it too,” he said, squeezing my hand.  “It makes me feel like my heart will never break.”

Oh, my sweet boy.  If only.