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Almost Done

Almost Done

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It’s the 11th hour, an unusual one for me to write. The day is almost done instead of just beginning. But the house is as quiet as morning; the same clocks are ticking.

Tomorrow will be a weekend family getaway. I’ve loaded the car with groceries and will pack the perishables in the morning. Monopoly and Scrabble are going, and a deck of cards.  The dog and the thousand-piece puzzle are staying home.

You can’t wait for the perfect time; you grab the time you have and make it work. That’s how I’m feeling now, knowing that gratitude will well up soon, it always does.

Pink and White

Pink and White

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They were selling pink and white carnation corsages at church yesterday — pink if your mom is living, white if she is not. I bought neither, but even the choice made my eyes sting.

I can remember wearing corsages on long ago Easters and maybe I could even fish up a memory of wearing a corsage on Mother’s Day. It wasn’t reliving memories that made me sad. It was knowing that, if I had bought a flower yesterday, it would have been white.

Which is why I was even more grateful to come home, take a walk and spend the rest of Mother’s Day on the deck with my daughters. There were some vague plans for a group hike, but we all agreed that just sitting and talking was best.

There was a fullness to the day that doesn’t come often enough and is all the more precious when it does. There was laughing and talking and cooking and eating. And there was this thought, poignant and comforting : If my girls were wearing corsages, theirs would be pink.

Last Hurrah

Last Hurrah

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The day is winding down, I’ve edited what feels like a bajillion documents. Done some writing too, though not enough, never enough.

I come to this blank page, a page that’s been waiting for me since early this morning.

Must get an earlier start tomorrow. But still, there are a few minutes left of the business day, just long enough to find this photo, one I took walking around a farm park where I used to take the girls when they were young.

I was missing their young selves so intensely that day. So much so that I could almost hear them laughing and chattering from inside this barn.

But they are all grown up now, and other little voices fill this space.

Burrowing

Burrowing

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I’d like to say the thunder woke me up, but I was already awake and reading when I heard the first clap. But it did jolt me, and, more to the point, it upset Copper so that he scratched on the door to be comforted.

I escorted him to the basement, his place of safety — though if he only knew how many precariously stacked books and boxes are down there he might seek higher ground.

But burrowing and sheltering have their appeal. I thought about this over the weekend when I draped a comforter over some chairs on the deck to air it out and was immediately reminded of the blanket forts my brother and I made when we were young.

How cozy they were, how beguiling, as if no one would ever find us, as if (it seems to me now), we would never grow up.

Name That Path

Name That Path

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A recent walk through the Folkstone woods led me past a shady glade and creek curve where the girls used to play. They called it Brace Yourself. Maybe there was some feat of derring do they had to perform there, walking across the creek on a log or picking up a crawdad. I’m unclear why they gave it that name, but the point is that they did.

Brace Yourself got me thinking about the joy of naming places. I remember doing that when I was a kid. There was the Valley of Eternal Snows — a sheltered cove in the Ware Farm field behind our house, a place where I had once found some dirty snow late in the season.

And then there were the Block-up Boys — not exactly a place, I know. They were the bullies on the street who wouldn’t let me ride my tricycle to the top of the hill. (So there was a place involved, sort of.)

When we name a place we make it our own.  We look at it with fresh eyes; we see it whole. Why do we stop doing this as we get older? Do mortgages and responsibilities drive it away, this penchant for staking imaginative claim to the places we love?

I made a tiny vow right there at Brace Yourself. I decided to start naming the bridges and paths, the springs and glades. Even if no one else ever hears or knows these names — I will.

Staying on Track

Staying on Track

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Yesterday, a return to a favorite hike, the Cross County Trail between Colvin Run Mill and Georgetown Pike. The path was busy with mountain bikers, runners, families with grandparents and kids — including one grandpa who stepped off the fair-weather crossing into this stream.

He righted himself quickly and kept on walking. That’s the spirit: staying on track!

I hope I do that when I’m a grandparent (which, with a married daughter and son-in-law, may not be too far in my future). The key with the hiking and the crossing is the keeping-on part.

Yesterday made it easy: a springlike day that made an unexpected step in the creek not the worst thing in the world.

Missing Halloween

Missing Halloween

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Halloween makes me nostalgic for the days of young parenthood. With most other holidays, the nature and tenor of them, how we celebrate, changes as children grow. Christmas isn’t the same as it was when Santa or the Easter Bunny made “appearances,” but the days are still fundamentally the same — and we celebrate them together.

But Halloween is for little kids, and my kids … aren’t little anymore.

Still, Tom carved the pumpkin and I roasted the seeds. We handed out Snickers and Sour Patch Kids. Copper was his usual crazy self.

But I kept remembering when the girls would come back with their big pillowcase hauls, masks askew, makeup smeared. They would sort candy by size and brand, then commence trading.  Who wants my Milky Way? What’s a Heath Bar? Oh, no, not raisins!!

Which is all to say that the ghosts I saw last night weren’t creepy or scary. They were cuddly elephants, cute clowns and beautiful princesses — the memories of my own sweet girls when they were young.

Farewell to the Van

Farewell to the Van

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“For many families, it was a compromise made long ago,” I wrote back in 2003. “For us, it is a new one. The day we bought our minivan it rained for the first time in weeks. It’s a sign, I said. Even the heavens are crying.”

Now the heavens are crying again, this time because the van has given way to a shiny new Toyota Corolla.

Though initially resistant to van-dom, I grew to love the old car. After all, it was the spiritual heir to the ’60s woody station wagons, and as such reminded me of my youth in the back seat. The van was more comfortable, of course; these are modern children. But the basic principle remained the same: buy large vehicle and pack it with kids.

The van was a workhorse. It lapped up the miles without complaint, and wore its 240k with grace. In 14 years it gave us very little trouble. Though short on style it was long on practicality.  Its motto: I will get you there.

Oh, the carpools that car has known, the cellos and clarinets and sweaty track kids it has transported. The boats it has towed, the trips to college it has made, the moving of furniture into first apartments, including, just last month, the transporting of newlyweds to their home in Arlington. (We threw rice!)

All of which is to say, what a lot of living that car has known! So I can’t let it go without a backward glance.

Thank you, dear van! We’ll miss you!

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day

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On this Mother’s Day, my first without Mom, I think about a scene I witnessed at the beach and have thought about often since. It was nothing special; in fact it (or something similar) happens all the time. A little girl in pink was running down the shore. She caught my eye because there were precious few people on the beach that day — it was cold! — and also because she seemed young to be on her own.

I had no fear for the child, assumed she was being watched from some distant towel. Instead, I thought about what the world looked like through her eyes. Maybe her first burst of independence. The horizon spreading out before her, endless sand and a squawking gull she wanted to catch.

Then I saw a woman in quick pursuit. “Marina! Marina! Where do you think you’re going?”

The little girl turned, ready to be caught. The woman threw her arms wide open and dashed toward Marina, who was now flying toward her. Soon they came together; the woman gathering the child up in her arms and twirling her around.

It’s the oldest story and the truest story. And it made me think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, which I can never read with a dry eye, especially not today.

I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?

Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the grass for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her strong arms?

Empty Room

Empty Room

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Suzanne and Appolinaire moved out over the weekend. They left a stuffed-full center-hall colonial for a small blue house on a steep hill in Arlington. Walk up their sidewalk a few yards, crane your neck, whip out your binoculars — and you can see the Washington Monument. It’s that close to the city.

Meanwhile, in the outer ‘burbs, there’s an empty room. It’s been empty before, of course, while Suzanne lived in Africa for three-and-a-half years. But now she’s married, and — unless they’re between houses, as they were these last three months — they won’t be moving back.

It’s all as it’s supposed to be, and I’m delighted they’re settling into their new place.

It’s just that there’s this empty room — its exposed ticking mattress cover; the blank spots on the wall where the Les Mis poster used to be; the gaps in the book shelf. Even the cello is gone.

I’ll have to get used to it, that’s all.