Dining with Squirrels

Really.

I remember when our time at Four Friends was winding down how many people asked me what I was doing next.  I was reminded of my answer recently when I saw a former customer who asked me how the teaching was going.    Huh?    Apparently I’d told everyone I was thinking about becoming a teacher.  Well, I had to say something.

But I really have no idea what I’ll be doing as my darling children make their way into their futures.  I never have been a planner, so this transition was, well, no transition at all.  More like falling off a cliff.  Or flying thousands of miles on a jet to Italy in mere hours [more on that later].  One minute we were in summer, the next we weren’t.

Our summer was entirely blissful, sunny and sweet.  We slept until we woke up, and moved directly outside to play with the neighbors every single day.  A trip to the zoo was too organized and demanding for the likes of us.   Lucy learned to ride a two-wheeler, Ben went shirtless almost every day, and both of them grew two inches in 3 months.  Summer weeds.  Sunflowers.

And now, for the first time, Ben and Lucy are both in school every day, Ben in second grade, Lucia in first.  I felt last week as if we were hurtling toward a large pile of snow on the sledding hill and I was bracing myself for impact.  But it turned out to be a ramp-like pile of snow and the kids simply took off flying in the air, as if they knew it was a ramp all along.

Not that they didn’t object to being awoken at 7am on Tuesday.  Ben came out of sleep saying “no no no no no no no no” and Lucy moaned “WHY did you have to wake me up?”  The only person happy about this change was Karl, who has been a lonely man in the mornings this summer.  I apologized to him every day when I called to say good morning to him at work.  Good morning, honey, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get out of bed to say it in person.

But the inspiration of a new backpack got each kid up and out the door and onto their bikes for the new and exhilarating experience of riding your bike to school.  If you’re older than, say, 35, don’t bother telling me how you pushed all your siblings to school in a wagon uphill both ways for 5 miles there and 10 miles back.  Kids ride in cars now.  Even kids who live 6 blocks from school.  We did.  So riding our bikes felt nutty and wild and convicting.  Ben and Lucy’s were the only bikes on the rack.

And then into their respective classrooms for a day that will ever remain a mystery, as will all the days of school, to their mother.  What did they do in there for 7 hours?  When I picked them up, I looked for telltale signs of what happened, but they just looked sweaty.  And that may be the weirdest thing about sending your 5 and 7 year olds off to school.  After years of monitoring their every moment, every morsel in the mouth and every ensuing excretion, every moment, really, both waking and sleeping — after all that, they’re just GONE.  And when I picked them up after school, when Lucy merely said “it was fun” and Ben said “it was better than I thought,” I was satisfied, happy to suck on those words as if they would fill me up.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to “do” yet.  I just hate to distract myself from sight of my children flying off to this new country.  I may come up with something.  But I may not.  And I’d feel quite sheepish if, in 5 years, I came across you in the grocery store and you asked me how the llama farm was going.   For now, I’m just going to focus on the moments at hand, using as my inspiration this faithful quote from Marion Howe:

“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.  We want whoever to call or not to call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:  I am living.”