The end of summer
Riding back on our bikes from the beach as the sun was slowly falling towards the mountains, I noticed maple leaves turning red. Autumn always brings introversion. A time to take stock of the way the garden has turned out after the growing season; the way my feet look, with a flip-flop tan line and a callous from my bike shoes; the way my soul feels after months of expansion.
I’m a bit reluctant this year to give up the goodness of summer, though I love fall more than any other season: for its gathering, its harvest, the leaves like fire spreading up the hills. But fall, with its sheer flaming beauty is like a lover that you know you can’t keep, and before you’ve really learned its secrets, it’s already gone. Piles of graying leaves and twiggy silhouettes in its wake; and with it, an inner shedding. An hesitation. Moments of silence. Loneliness creeps back up to the surface of things, waiting for snow fall.
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Under a canopy of sunshine
Yesterday a 24 mile bike ride with Bean and one of my best girlfriends, out along the causeway. Lake water in every direction, ringed with mountains like we were in the middle of a blue bowl with a ragged edge.
The sky above us was sun-streaked and wind blown; tatters of clouds scudding by. Out at the end of the path, on the breakwater made with huge hunks of granite we ate sun-ripened peaches and laughed a lot.
Bean, his hair all sweaty and rumpled like baby duck down, sat in my lap sucking on the sweet peach flesh, making small grunting noises of glee. And we talked about how our mothers came from a generation that believed part of the duty of being a mother was being a martyr. That somehow raising a child meant loosing oneself.
Later, over wine and grilled corn with friends, we made a ruckus untill well past midnight; the seams of our lives nearly blurring completely.
And this morning, at the corner breakfast place, heaps of French toast, coffee, fresh papaya and melon and mango, Bean slept in the Bjorn on my chest. It works, this life we’ve made for ourselves with him in it. There are differences, surely. But it’s not the bittersweet sacrifice my mother made it out to be—in so many ways her life ceased when mine began.
It’s a matter of definitions, it seems. Of expectations. What makes life good for me has started to have much less to do with outcomes than with the process itself. Knowing that I’ll be woken several times a night by a baby who is uncomfortable and teething, seeking solace, leaves me two options: to feel frustrated, resentful, exhausted; or to knit the moments of half waking snuggled close against his fragrant sleepy head, into a night. And then wake up in the morning with a clean slate, greeted by the warm embrace of my husband, our baby inching his way over our bodies, giggling with joy.
I wanted to tell this to the couple we saw at the restaurant carefully carrying their two week old baby in his convertible car seat, their eyes still wide with wonder and lack of sleep. Instead I said simply, “It gets better and better every day.”
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