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.
family
Summer at last
It is finally summer. A few images of the last several days:
Crazy gorgeous blue sky. I love the faint tracing of an airplane’s straight line juxtaposed with the puffy clouds. A reminder of all that is linear and all that is utterly non-linear.
Grace on the camp bus.
Continuing to try to let go. Lately have been thinking of how it’s futile to try to surrender. Ridiculous to effort to let go. Trying to parse that one.
The steeple of the art center on the corner against a blue sky is one of my very favorite views.
Walking back from the school bus in the slanting late-afternoon sunlight.
My Renaissance man painting on the beach (under the wonderful tutelage of Sally, one of the Four Family mothers)
Matching shoes for dinner out at a local restaurant.
Sound sleep, in a hot room with animals nearby.
wings
I always think of their shoulder blades as wings. Their wings, poking through their skin. And his little back has two freckles on it now, marks marring his white, skim-milk skin, my skin. Life beginning to make its mark on my child.
The wings, though, are on my mind today. The wings.
This past winter Whit went through a phase when he slept every night with his hand clasped around the little compass my parents gave him in his stocking for Christmas. I always wondered, when I went in to kiss him goodnight, where his dreams were taking him. Where was he flying, in his sleep, guided by the true north he could always check in his palm?
May they have both a compass and wings, my children. Oh, please, please: never let them lose that physical sensation of wonder, that feeling that I always associate with wings beating in my chest. And please, please: let me help them each find their own internal compass, that needle that tugs north. That internal compass which can be trusted to orient us, no matter what whitewater we tumble in.
I’m still looking for both my compass and my wings, and, oddly enough, my children provide them for me better than anything else in my life. They seem to have both already. Maybe we’re born with our wings and our compass, and the task of our lives, at once simple and enormous, is not to lose them.
Our mothers’ names
“How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.” Alice Walker
I was on the phone recently with one of my best friends who was headed to a family wedding, and our conversation shifted to talking about her aunts, uncles, and cousins who would be there. I asked her what her grandmothers’ names had been, surprised that I didn’t know. We talked about the names of the generations of women who walked before us, enacting, I suppose, the very thing that Virginia Woolf asserts: “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.”
And after we hung up I floated on a sea of names, whose waters swirl with women I know intimately, some of whom are now gone, and with women I never had the chance to meet. Among all of these women, including myself and Grace, there ripples a cord of connection and commonality that is almost as difficult to articulate as it is impossible to deny.
Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor
These are the names of where I come from, the names of my root system, the names of the women whose very blood beats in my veins. They stand sentinel at my mother’s gardens, in search of which I found my own (Alice Walker). I thought of Julie’s beautiful post about this, which I looked for after I’d started this post, and which opened with the very same lines (goosebumps).
Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor.
And also: Grace.
What are the names you come from?
Inexorable as the tides
summer 2007
summer 2011
Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit. What happened to my baby?
first day of Beginners, September 2009
last day of Kindergarten, June 2011
My baby is 6.5 He swims competently, though inelegantly. He reads short words. He loves Star Wars and Legos. He beats up on his sister. He makes me laugh every single day. He is about to lose a tooth. He still curls up in my arms when I pick him up at night. He tells me he loves me as much as the sky. He has a very strong sartorial point of view. It’s not his fault, but he also makes me cry every single day.
The transitions, big and small, keep coming at me, inexorable as the tides. When will I learn to let go, to float on them?