A Return

In case anyone is wondering, I have not written in my blog for almost exactly a year. This has been intentional (as opposed to just forgetting about it, I suppose?). In a quick recap of this last year, including why I have not been blogging - life sucked. It actually sucked a lot, as implied by the larger print. Things are better now, so no worries, please. But basically, yeah, last year was the hardest period I've been through to date. I'm still processing things and sorting out the life lessons. I'm not going to rehash this past year in specifics. One of the things about your children growing older is that you realize they don't really appreciate having their private lives become fodder for mommy's public musings. I recognize that it's well past time for me to stop blogging about things that are private in regard to them. However, it is important for me to write. I think I have reached a place now where life is gentle again, and I might be comfortable blogging.

So I'm going to try.

Since I've become an adult, it might be an understatement to say that I have not been a fan of summertime. I loved it when I was a kid, of course. My sisters and I spent most of our summers exploring the neighborhood and the empty lots beside our house in rural Texas, completely immersed in whichever fantasy game we decided upon for that day. We might be orphaned children that had escaped from the evil torture of our orphanage, trying (and succeeding) to outsmart Hog-Jaw and the Pig-Snouts, who were policeman-like bad, bad, oh so bad men that were trying to return us to our orphan-prison. The Pig-Snouts were ugly, fairly stupid flunkies who attempted to track us everywhere, including the town down the highway where my grandparents and aunts lived. They were relentless. It wasn't our fault that we very often had to escape through windows and "steal" bicycles to frantically race through the streets to outwit the Pig-Snouts.We headed them off at school playgrounds by deftly weaving through parking lots, and on one occasion, we climbed onto the car shed by my aunt's house and tried unsuccessfully to break into her apartment for cover (I'm not sure that she knows about this attempt. Maybe she figured it out when she found wood chips clogging her keyhole???). We hid from Hog Jaw and his flunkies in the dense, dank forest across the street from our house, which were dubbed the "Angel Grounds" (and which played prominently in various other fantasy worlds we created on other days). On any given day, we might be tiny tiny people living in another dimension - our forests were but tiny weeds to the next dimension of people. Or the jungle gym in our backyard might become an underground cave, and each space in the ladders ringing the cave was a tunnel leading to a different land. This last fantasy was more than a little odd because we'd each embark alone on our on tales, running alone through the neighborhood seeing and experiencing our own version of reality for a good long while, and then return to the cave at some set time to share our adventures with each other in stories. When we weren't designing elaborate stories, we might drive to the town where my grandparents lived to go swimming at the local the swimming pool. The order of business on these excursions was to walk barefoot across the hot pavement from the car to the pool. We (or as my sisters might correct me..."I") decided that we could only enhance the joy of jumping into the cool water if our feet were truly blistering at the point of contact. We had long weekends at the Galveston beach, my memories of which are punctuated with peeling away layers of my sun burnt skin, the taste of saltwater and sand in my mouth, building sandcastles decorated with "quicksand" enhancements (in which quicksand was the result of a saltwater and sand mix, poured into spirals and adornments that would harden within a few seconds of pouring.) We skipped through the waves to avoid the jellyfish while looking for shells, and played dominoes in the cold, cold air of the rental house. My grandfather loved to put his grandchildren to work hand cranking the ice cream maker. I don't ever remember truly hardened ice cream, but I remember the most delicious, sweet creams, occasionally dotted with an explosion of salt from the freezer along with peppermint candy that would come at the end of suppers of spaghetti or hamburgers. Summertime was composed of magnificent camping trips in my family's camper, when my parents allowed us to bring along nearly half of the kids we knew in town. We would set up tents and sit around the campfire telling ghost stories while eating s'mores and swatting the June bugs away from our faces, and then we would spend the days paddling through lakes in inflatable boats, landing on islands that were ripe for adventure making. Summertime was an absolutely titillating, glorious and entirely sensory experience.

As with so many things, the process of growing up has tended to dampen my imagination-driven enthusiasm for summer. These days, when I think of summer from my middle-aged and so very mature perspective, I envision bugs and heat and dirt. I see the weeds overtaking my flower beds because it is too miserably hot and humid to spend any more time outside than it takes to walk from the car to the door of my air-conditioned house. I resent the disruption to my schedule as my kids become fluid creatures that sleep for periods that may vary to be any period within the diurnal cycle. I view summer as the necessary evil to get from spring to my beloved fall. I have envied people living in the Pacific northwest or the far north, as in, Nova Scotia, for not being forced to endure the humid torturous conditions that define my summers in southeast Virginia.

So, back in the spring this year, when things in my life still sucked, I decided to start practicing meditation and I started to attend a weekly sangha (Buddhist meditation group). One of the major focuses in Buddhism is mindfulness - simply paying attention to the present moment.  I decided it would be a very good idea this year to practice mindfulness of the season this summer to try to re-embrace some of the things I used to love about it. I decided to slow down and try to return to the perspective of a child. (I want to take an abbreviated aside at this point, and point out that one of the things I have realized from my work at meditation and mindfulness, is that we are very good at this as children. Sometimes when I am meditating, and I feel like I have reached a good solid point of being in the present, I am flooded with memories and feelings from childhood. I think that time went so slowly and things seemed so much more significant in childhood because we were naturally mindful. I think this is a skill that we forget as we assimilate into adult society). To a large extent, this has worked. I have had a much more enjoyable summer than I've had in a very long time. I have stopped on my walk from the car to my air conditioned house to watch the butterflies at our butterfly bush perform their exquisite dance of tasting each tiny bud in the flowers.  I have tried to remember to savor each unique moment - my daughter overflowing with joy at the connections she made at a camp and my son exploding in growth at being in a leadership role in his band. I savor the flavor of the tomatoes we get from our CSA. I savor the growth. Summer is alive in so many ways.

And yet.

I was driving down the winding road to my house today and I saw 4 yellow leaves fluttering by the side of the road. I noticed this and looked to the sky. It was clear and bright, yet there was something- the sense of the imminence of  fall was there. My stomach did a flip-flop. I checked weather.dot.com and saw that we have a cold front scheduled to come in tonight. My son has started marching band rehearsals. I am starting to pencil in fall activities in my date book. I can smell the fires and I can feel the cold air. The school year is starting (I have a Junior and an 8th grader this year!!!). Football. School. New Beginnings. I am learning to love summer again, thanks to mindfulness. Fall is easy. Fall has always been easy for me to love. It has been many falls, however, since I have had the time to let go and let myself love. This is going to be the year that I can do that.  Live doesn't suck anymore. I am learning to be more mindful. And the earth is turning and rotating as it always does, and autumn is coming to where I am. And I am open for it this year.

Things are good.