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Benin Bound

Benin Bound

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When we moved to Virginia, Suzanne was a six-month old baby. Today she flies to Benin, West Africa, to begin two-plus years of Peace Corps service. The room into which she’s crammed two decades worth of books and photos, dreams and plans — that room is preternaturally tidy now.

I made myself go in it late yesterday, though I would just as soon have left the door closed. But as she begins her adventure overseas, we begin the adventure of living without her.

It’s what you do as a parent and as a human being, learn to live without the ones you love.  This time the sadness has a fullness to it, though, a sense of life renewing itself. And that makes me grateful for it, in the same way that I’m glad for much-needed rain or the first crisp days of fall.

I don’t know where Suzanne will be stationed in this strange new country. Will it be in the south, near the water, or in the north, near the Sahel? More likely somewhere in the middle.

All I know is that the map of Benin that Suzanne studied for months is now in my possession. I’m the one studying its towns and rivers; I’m the one dreaming about the day when I can visit this faraway place.

 

No Buffer

No Buffer

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The rain was unexpected. It drenched our seat cushions, fell through my open car window. The last few days were such perfection I had almost forgotten there could be clouds and showers. But they were in the wings all along, waiting to come again.

This weekend we celebrated Father’s Day and had a “bon voyage” dinner for Suzanne. With these events behind us there is nothing to buffer us from the departure itself. Our next big family gathering is more than two years away.

But these are rainy day thoughts. In general, I try not to think like this. I tell myself that our family is becoming international and virtual. It’s expanding, not contracting. Most of all, I remind myself that this is what happens, what I always told our children they should do: grow up and make their own way in the world.

Perhaps I didn’t mean for them to take the “world” part so literally. But there you have it.

Wind-Walking

Wind-Walking

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It may come as no surprise that I take parenting advice with a grain of salt. But I do think about one bit of wisdom I once heard — that to raise children these days you have to walk against the wind. I’ve been doing a lot of wind-walking lately, both literally and metaphorically. Which is perhaps why it was strangely satisfying to pound the pavement this cold morning.

Yesterday the bitter cold took me by surprise. I was out early, had only one tissue in my pocket, and I sniffled and snuffled and tiptoed over icy patches all along my route. My hands were so cold I had to ball them up inside my thin gloves. I never hit my stride.

Today I was better prepared. More layers. Ears covered. Thicker gloves. Still only one tissue but hey, life isn’t perfect. It felt good to walk against the wind today. A shivering dose of reality. Always better when faced.

For Celia

For Celia

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Today is Celia’s birthday, my brother Drew’s too. They are in good company. Winston Churchill was born on this day, as was Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote Anne of Green Gables.

Reading up on Twain a bit this morning, I learn that he loved cats. Celia is an animal lover in general and a cat lover in particular. So in her honor, here are some of Twain’s thoughts on cats:

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.
-“An Incident,” Who Is Mark Twain?

A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.
-Notebook, 1895

Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.
– A Tramp Abroad

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
– Notebook, 1894


Mark Twain’s cats
photo by Elmira photographer
Elisha M. VanAken, 1887
[Photo from the Dave Thomson collection]

Template and Canvas

Template and Canvas

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Today is the birthday of the British writer George Eliot, author of Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, who was sent away to boarding school at age 5 but who was still able to write these words: “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

It’s an observation no one else I’ve read has made in quite the same poetic and pithy way, that the sights and sounds of growing up become the template and the canvas upon which our love of the natural world is painted.

I think of it often, remembering the awe of my early years in the world, the way an empty lot could become a fairy meadow, or a scraggly woods the forest primeval. It’s an awe that lives in me still and surprises me from time to time, the rallying cry of beauty.

Here’s Eliot again. I’ll end with her because she says it best: “Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.”

Smooth Stone

Smooth Stone

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I become attuned to the Proustian moments of life. Not only the ones I read about — how the sound of a shovel hitting rock changed a man’s life; how the steam from a hissing iron takes a friend back into her mother’s kitchen — but also the ones I experience firsthand.

I had one this morning. It wasn’t so much a link to the past as it was an instant when time stopped and the eternal rushed in. I was driving Celia and her friend to school. We were running late (as usual) and the traffic was bumper to bumper (as usual) and the obnoxious people who take a shortcut and expect to be let in (also as usual — grumble, grumble) were making it anything but a pleasant drive.

But all of a sudden it didn’t matter. The car was purring slowly toward school. I was the only one awake. The 15-minute drive had lulled both teenagers to sleep. Their heads were nodding. In 20 minutes they would be taking the PSAT. In 20 minutes I would be crammed onto the Orange Line. But right then, we were as one. A moment of enforced togetherness not unlike the entire experience of raising teenagers, trying to treasure the moments, even when the moments are tense, silent and filled with strife.

I know this experience won’t banish the discord. But it can become a talisman, a smooth stone to keep in my pocket and hold when the hard times come.

Safe Haven

Safe Haven

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For many years now we’ve had more than one teenager in our family. Today, as Claire celebrates her 20th birthday, we only have one.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adolescence lately, its pains and its challenges mostly, its crabwise path — often sideways rather than straight up or down. The circuitous road to freedom and responsibility.

I’ve read enough history to know that Western adolescence is a relatively new creation. Kids used to grow up a lot faster behind a plow or on a factory floor. A common metaphor for young adulthood now, of course, is a launching pad. A place where our young ones perch lightly on their way out of the nest.

Look closely at this photo and you’ll see the egret on the deer’s back. An unlikely pair — as unlikely perhaps as middle-aged parents and their teenage offspring. But the deer offers her back as solace, as resting place, as safe haven. Stay here a bit until you’re ready to fly farther. You know you’re safe here. We have your back — and you have ours.

Stop-Time

Stop-Time

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It was not the night I would have chosen to watch home movies of the girls. But Suzanne is here, and she is in a cataloging state of mind. So I found an excuse to go downstairs, to walk by the TV, and once I started watching I couldn’t stop. For there they were again — our grown-up girls as babies and toddlers, dancing and playing and learning to walk.

Here you are, you three, I wanted to say. Where have you been hiding? This is the way you’re supposed to be, giggling and singing and stirring soap suds in the sink. It’s not time for you to graduate from college, to drive to the beach, to have your first job.

It was all I could do to sit still and watch their chubby arms reaching out as they took their first steps into the world. I want to be there all over again for them, be there in a way that was so much easier than the way I must be there for them now.

On Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day

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Weeding, digging, mixing clay soil with peat moss and sand, preparing the ground for growth — for many years I have planted annuals on Mother’s Day. It is a chore that takes me, if only for an hour or two, into another world. The part I like the most, of course, is the end point of all the preparation — spading the newly friable soil and tucking the begonia or impatiens plants into it.

The timing of this task does not escape me. Every time I do it, yesterday for instance, I think of the metaphorical aspect of this Mother’s Day chore, of planting the tender-rooted flowers, of launching them into what I hope is a season of profusion. The teenage years have changed the way I think about this metaphor. I worry more about the hazards, the hard-packed clay, the weeds that choke, the rain that doesn’t fall, the deer who breakfast on my garden.

And yet, I still plant.

A Creek

A Creek

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The ground is saturated. Rain water trickles through the soil and into drainage ditches that divide the meadow. Yesterday I spotted a young boy squatting down beside one of those ditches. His bike laid carelessly on its side, as if he couldn’t wait to plunge into the water, to see what he might find there.

I remembered the park a street behind us when I was this boy’s age. There was a creek that wound around the park, and the playground smelled of fresh mud. I imagine the creek flooded in the spring of the year. But I wouldn’t have noticed that at the time.

All I knew then was the smell of the run in the dank days of spring, standing on the bank, immersed as this boy was immersed, catching crawdads or, later, bottling creek water to look at under my microscope. Every day had the same catch in its breath as these days do.