When swallowtail butterflies wake up in the morning and climb out of their sleeping bags, they sit still and angle themselves toward the sun. They need to warm up, need to absorb enough sunlight into their muscles before they can fly.
There is no way I would have believed you if you told me last summer that I would feel better this summer despite Quinn still not being home. If you had told me last July that he still wouldn’t be home this July it might have done me in. Holding these Julys up side by side, there is no contest. I am no less tattered, but last July I was having trouble climbing out of my sleeping bag.
This July I am sitting still beside the sunlight each morning.
This July I am flying.
Tattered survivors. Pieces torn away. Wings made of something as fragile as tissue paper or gauze stretched across the thinnest wire, would melt in heavy rain, would shred in strong wind, would shatter in a freeze.
I watch them hold onto the flowers and ride the wind.
This July, I am holding on to the flowers and riding the wind.
“Some people have an aesthetic of delineation and symmetry, of keeping each vegetable distinct from each other vegetable. That’s great, and it works for them. My philosophy, though, is abundance. I want to draw people in with color, and piles of overflowing vegetables, spilling forth from cornucopias, piling into one another, blending into a rainbow.”
I stacked sopping wet bunches of carrots, cold water droplets sprinkling the multicolored veggie-print fabric on which I laid them. The new staff member painted by number, adding veggies to each basket I had laid out with a representative of what I wanted there.
Laurie had asked me to help refresh the vibe of our market booth. When she asked me to make a rainbow display, it flipped a switch for me. My pandemic farmer’s market year-plus has been a continued effort of showing up, devotion, doing what I believe in – food security, organic growing, getting food to the people. It used to be more about enjoyment than just devotion. I haven’t been making displays, much less rainbow ones. I have been letting the crew who handled the veggies handle the veggies, while I handled the money. An important job, but not soul-nourishing. Emerging from the pandemic has been halting and awkward, as predicted, but it’s been dawning on us that we can revive some things, like big, beautiful displays. The prospect of making a sweeping swath of veggie artwork before me, I was back to excited.
Cascading eggplants, purple onions, and purple majesty potatoes, purple carrots with their orangey-red lateral root scars. Fragrant basil, parsley, dill, and mint flooding green leaves around four kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, and broccoli. Pattypan and yellow summer squash the color of sunshine blending into goldenrod-hued sweet Italian peppers, their tapered tips and seductive shoulders peeking from a basket near the center, making their summer debut. A mountain of orange carrots, golden beets blending into red beets, red Norland potatoes, dryland (non-irrigated) tomatoes, concentrated red succulence.
While searching for the term for the lines on a carrot, wondering about that specific feature of rootiness, I stumbled upon a Plant Ontology forum (as one does) and learned they can also be called root periderm scars. I guess they have been called root lenticels, but it is now understood that they do not conduct gas-exchange. They are formed when lateral roots emerge and initiate a wound response in the periderm – the peripheral cell layers. Cells proliferate, heal over this wound, form a new layer. The plant ontologists decided a new name, root periderm scars, was warranted.
It makes me think about how forming new roots can inflict injury. How wounds can result in scars, in tissue that cannot breathe. But also how injury can give rise to new growth, new layers.
I passed the tub of paid-for veggies to the outside of the sneeze guard and the customer turned sideways to me to pack them into her bag. I dipped my gloved hands in bleach again, looked around at the customers standing six feet apart, the colorful fabrics of their face masks. As I turned back towards her, her earring caught my eye – a beautiful piece, rose colored stones, the kind of earring with a tear drop shaped central stone and many little jingly bits of metal and beads dangling, like a musical feather. “What beautiful earrings,” I said.
“Thank you, they were my mother’s. When I was little, I would hear the sound of them, so now when I wear them, I hear that sound and feel surrounded by her, and by those happy memories.”
Hearing of mother connections is especially poignant as I grapple with separation, and her story came as an unexpected gift. I feel surrounded by my mom’s love when I am wrapped in one of her quilts. I have been delivering care packages in my own attempt to wrap my love around Quinn as well, as we approach five months of separation. Snacks, books, a box of seeds to grow, feathers.
It’s molting season for the birds. Every few days I look down during our bayou walks and discover a new feather shed by one of our local jays and once even a raven! This ritual shedding of items that are no longer useful seems apt. Mom and I have been talking about how we both base a lot of our worthiness on our usefulness. I am underproducing for work and powerless as a parent, so my usefulness is quite diminished. Perhaps it is time to molt, to let go of old ideas about worthiness, like feathers that need to retire from service. These feathers have done their gravity-defying work and have performed valiantly, but their ragged edges are no longer streamlined, no longer serving to decrease resistance to the flow.
The day I found an owl feather, I had really been missing Quinn, and it was a small comfort to find a trace of his favorite animal that I could pick up and hold in my hand. Its softness and lightness brought a lift I was needing. I held onto it for a week or so, but when the time came to deliver another care package, I tucked it in a ziplock bag with the latest stash of feather finds.
That same afternoon on my walk with Rich, I found one more owl feather, in the very same spot I had found the first one. This one I think I’ll keep.
Quinn will be the first to tell you that birds are dinosaurs. I would fill his care packages with live baby dinosaurs if I could, but feathers are the closest thing I can surround him with, my nestling who has fledged too soon. Of all the ephemeral things, a feather, when as a mother so much of my energy has been spent striving to overcome impermanence for him. He is a sensitive person who was a bit devastated when the peep we microwaved could not be reconstituted into its previous form – things that are fun for other kids cause him grief. He explained that he did not want to study the woolly mammoth, one of his all-time favorites, because he really wishes he could see a live one, and their extinction hurts too much. Change, transitions, extinction, impermanence. Throwing anything away is a struggle for him, so every week he went to his dad’s I carefully removed detritus from his room just beneath his limits of detection.
I have been realizing that my mom did this for me as a child, too. Thinking of birds and dinosaurs and peeps just reminded me that she once learned how to poke a pinhole in each end of an egg to blow the contents of the egg into a bowl, leaving a pristine egg surface for decorating that would not spoil. I have a feeling she might have been wishing she could just put her feet up, but she strove to overcome some impermanence for me when I grieved the demise of my colorful easter eggs.
Part of the devastation of this time is there is no protecting our children from these losses they are enduring. However, protecting our children from learning how to handle loss might be another idea that is ready to be molted, replaced with some new plumage. We will just have to trust that it will grow in brighter, stronger, readier for streamlined flight than that which it is replacing.
I am grateful that when I walked out of the house this morning without my purse and the door locked behind me that I had also forgotten to lock the back door the last time I went through it. Double forgetfulness, like double negative, is a positive.
I decided to hide a spare key inside Quinn’s play kitchen tea kettle, and then decided I’d make a blog post about it, so I can look it up when I forget where it is hidden. (In omitting the location of the tea kettle so internet villains will not be able to break into our house, I run the risk that I may still not find the hidden key at a future forgetful date.)
I’ve had his tea kettle on the back burner of my mind as a dear object I have been wanting to trace back in time in writing. Though right now it is sometimes better to keep a lid on the memories, there are days, like today, when it feels as comforting as a mug of tea to steep myself in treasured moments from the past.
Quinn’s tea kettle was far and away his favorite play kitchen item, a present for his birthday when he turned two. I would tidy up his kitchen at night and when he would wake up in the morning he would go straight to it, pouring bunny snacks, raisins, and popcorn between the colander, the pot, and the tea kettle. He would finish his evening making dishes such as “people pasta,” simmering all of his wooden people figurines in the tea kettle.
He was in love with having, “berry berry my own tea kettle,” so I sang, “I’m a little teapot” to him, of course. Then, of course, he made me sing it a million times, with the hand motions. Then he modified it to sing to himself, “I’m a little tea kettle.”
It moved with us from that green house where he turned two to our orange house, where he was growing so mature he would request a teabag and make his own tea kettle full of tea to pour himself.
It moved again to the dragon house, and after we cleaned out the playhouse there, his play kitchen was installed, tea kettle and all. By five, he was interested in dinosaurs, chess, and ewoks, and may not have played as much with his kitchen set, but the tea kettle still got played with the most.
When we moved here to dragon house 2.0 and Quinn turned ten, I painted an old computer desk into an outdoor play kitchen for all the children we knew would be attending our upcoming wedding. Quinn approved of using his kitchen stuff, tea kettle included, to furnish the Rainbow Restaurant.
Memories of that week will always make my heart bubble over with joy.
The day started with a little forgetfulness, but ended up with a heart full to the brim and spilling over with gratitude for the memories.
My friend just went through breast cancer surgery and we are on the phone discussing poop colors and whether medical waste is incinerated, and unexpected emotional devastation even when all the decisions we’ve made have been absolutely right. I am not a good phone friend, but if you are going to call me, it’s likely going to be about something raw and gritty like this. In my imagination I am allowing fire to be the outcome of where breasts go when they are removed because there are powerful metaphors in fire. Inked across the shoulder and upper arm of this friend is, rather prophetically, a phoenix. We forget fire can be a creative source of energy when we see it cause so much destruction, but the phoenix dies engulfed in flame only to be reborn out of the ashes. There is so much about our current moment that feels devastating and destructive, an inferno threatening the best things about this world, and yet if I summon the courage to look into the fire, this little thing with feathers is poking its head up out of the ashes, getting ready to be reborn. Creative plans will hatch to make a way, through art, to integrate having been utterly torn down and the work it will take to be reborn, feather by feather. The other day as she noted that her breasts, or the breast-shaped spaces they used to occupy, were burning (a good, albeit painful, sign that she is told indicates healing; mothers understand about productive pain when it comes to birth), we planned a future campfire photo art session. Like a grappling hook tossed a long way out ahead of us that we can climb to if we keep putting one foot in front of the other, this tiny plan gives us a target, a rope to grasp, a direction out of the furnace. Though the flames haven’t even subsided, and the hatchling may be weak and covered in all this ash right now, she will eventually emerge powerful and courageous. In my life there is a son-shaped hole, while her kids are there but she can’t really be with them, and it hurts; these are the people we carried in our bodies, pieces removed from us with great pain and at great cost to ourselves, more than we ever expected. Your baby is born, and you need so much more absorbent cloth than you realize to soak up all manner of fluids drawn up out of you by the gravitational force of their orbit around you. You were expecting a swaddled bundle, not a planet with its own atmosphere and trajectory. What to expect when you’re expecting a phoenix: there are expectations and then there is reality, and that book title seems to be out of print, or maybe it hasn’t been written. Yet. For now, it’s DIY phoenix midwifery. Birth and rebirth are messy, painful, intense, productive, and creative. Our children, too, are being devastated by this fiery time, and they, too, will rise, powerful, from the ashes, stronger than before, better for it. Inked on the lower part of the same arm as the phoenix is the one word calling to mind that thing with feathers, the one being reborn from these ashes, the one that never stops: hope.
Have you seen me lately? is the title of one of my depression songs. I hardly ever listen to the Counting Crows anymore, but the feeling that I have gone missing lately is a little bit accurate.
When I go missing, when I need to retrieve myself, the ocean is where I go. During a pandemic, it may mean going to the ocean at 6:30 am on a Monday, and it may mean going less frequently, but the ocean is still where I go to collect myself and bring myself back. Here I am, standing, kneeling beside the crowded tidepools of my inner world. There beside them, soaking in the brine, is the end of a long strand of mended rope. I pick it back up in my hand, ready to start adding to the storyline, twisting new strands, threading on new beads and seashells, eventually stringing more cranberries and popcorn once it is a little less soggy.
How does it happen that I would ever set this rope down? I know better. I repeat to myself like a mantra why I write. I repeat it enough that others know it, can paraphrase it. The fragmentation that once characterized my inner experience was the result of mental health crisis – major depression brought on mostly by emotional abuse (gone), but also a little bit predisposition (still there). Fragmentation, a broken storyline, allowed me to lie to myself, disconnect from myself, betray myself, something I remain committed to never do again. Writing is my best tool to maintain a cohesive storyline, to integrate the various pieces of myself into one narrative that I can keep my grip on, so that I can see the connections between one segment and another, so that I can tell if I am being true to who I am and so that I can tell if I am deviating from my truth or forgetting crucial pieces of the story.
Too much slack in the line is a different problem from fragmentation, but tangles are not conducive to okayness either. Winds will blow on me, waves will continue to endlessly pass, and if I am not doing the steady, dynamic tending this line of mine requires, it can become knotted and snarled. These posts piling up behind the scenes, where I keep second guessing myself and saving to drafts, need to start being eased out before they accumulate further. Like the sheet that controls the business end of the sail, my line works to keep me on course, to keep the wind coming across my sails in the most efficient way to maintain forward progress, to keep me from capsizing, to keep the sails full not flogging, to keep me from wallowing in the doldrums.
There is a certain amount of tension required to keep ahold of myself, in other words. The danger is there to become too tense, to hold on rigidly, which can also rock the boat. When my shoulders start to reach my ears, my hands are clenched, and I am holding my breath too often, I need to loosen my grip, inhale, exhale, and observe what the ocean is doing. Take stock, adjust course.
You can sail forward even when the wind is close to your bow, but there is a reason why they call it “beating to windward.” Heading into the oncoming wind and seas (usually they are coming from a related direction to one another, though not always) can feel like a beating. The motion of the vessel is more jarring, the force of the impact coming down from the crest of each swell causes the whole hull to shudder and the rigging to vibrate, and the ship is heeled over at quite an angle. The ship must be tacked much more frequently to maintain course, an act which by its very nature strains every line and piece of hardware, every tired seam and joint. Changing direction frequently just to keep going forward is exhausting, and you must ensure the coffee pot is lashed in the galley, the deck gear all stowed.
Still, it is while sailing to windward that I have most often encountered dolphins riding the bow wake. It is also only in the dark of night that the bow wake glows with bioluminescence. Remembering my study of the word “streamlined” a couple of years ago, I recall my conclusion that the status of the flow around me has less to do with turbulence in my life, than what shape I present to the flow; that if I present less resistance to the flow, I have a more streamlined experience. Salmon use the energy of the current to propel themselves upstream; adversity is not a direct line to crisis, in fact it can be a force of energy that is harnessed for good.
I feel as though, right now, I am swimming upstream against a strong current, or sailing into a strong wind. I am okay, but I am on watch for signs of slipping down the current too far towards the waterfall’s edge, or letting the wind get around behind the wrong side of my sails. I am okay, but I am swimming hard with nothing in reserve, I am beating to windward and taking a beating. I am okay, but I am only okay because I know firsthand the consequences of slipping downstream, of capsizing.
At market one recent Saturday, a lovely woman handed me a bundle of braided sweetgrass. She grows it herself, and she said she wanted to give it to me because I inspire her. I am using it to smudge this space and reclaim it, to clear out any traces of energy that would keep me quiet, that would turn down my voice, that would ask me to be smaller, less than fully me.
“It lives in my imagination strongly that the black oak is pleased to be a black oak. I mean of all them, but in particular one tree that is as shapely as a flower, that I have often hugged and put my lips to. Maybe it is a hundred years old. And who knows what it dreamed of in the first springs of its life, escaping the cottontail’s teeth and everything dangerous else? Who knows when supreme patience took hold, and the wind’s wandering among its leaves was enough of motion, of travel?”
~Mary Oliver
The day is hot and lazy, and my mind wades around the meandering bend of the river I sat on the bank of with Quinn just a few days ago, gazing at the leaf boats of that singular day as they begin to drift towards the horizon of memory. Downstream around a few more bends, more memories swirl around an eddy on the edge of consciousness, and I just catch a glimpse of him with pinchable cheeks, stacking river rocks into “snowmen” to match the snowman pajama pants he wore. The size of him in my backpack on this same riverbank stands back-to-back in contrast with how he has drawn up even in height with his dad.
(still life with sippy cup, May, 2009)
His voice then was a giddy gurgling over the river rocks, while his voice now glugs into a much deeper gully. I can hear this in person in a way I cannot hear it through the screen of our pandemic parenting paradigm.
We hike all the way down the switchbacks to the river. Beside a grove of giant cedar trees, we perch on separate rocks, and do not come close enough for me to smell the top of his head, to see if his scalp still carries the scent of a pinch of cinnamon. What does reach me is the zest of the tangerine he is peeling with his large, capable hands, and this scent, too, tethers me to him briefly, remembering how I ate my pregnant body weight in clementines in my third trimester, the memory only eclipsed by the thought that I should not tell him I can smell his lunch, or he will suggest we sit farther apart.
The hands get me, they have changed so much since he grappled with stacking those stones, when the river had swallowed less rain, on a different lazy summer day over a decade ago. I think about those hands, the way they would still reach for mine on the way up to the school building in fifth grade, the way they slid over slippery gray clay making a pinch pot in second grade, the glazed surface of which now preserves the texture only a six-year-old’s fingers could produce. The necklace my Mom gave to me and I wore for my wedding shines in a silver puddle in its shallow cavity. The destiny of many a child’s pinch pot is to perfectly contain treasures as precious as themselves.
Wandering in a wilderness area together all day is unlike our hour-long video calls in all ways, but most acutely in that I am positioned beside the waterfall of his imagination like I have not been in months. The story comes spilling forth of a pod of whimsical dragons hatched out of colorful eggs, each with powerful attributes perfectly complementing those of their teammates. Once we found our first wild rose, we found many. It was in a rose bush that I found my first dragon egg, of the species Photosynthesim draconis. Once we spotted our first crayfish, we found many, and this time a water dragon was hatched. Once we found one dragon egg, we found more, as it is with many wild things for which one wasn’t even necessarily looking. All day, the tale flows in between the huge trunks of the trees we pass by, a comfortable third companion on the journey. Unlooked for, it simply appears like a rainbow where the sunlight refracts in the droplets splashing over the rapids, though the sun and the water never touch.
The last time we hiked all the way to this river, Quinn napped on my back most of the way. Before we built rock snowmen, we threw rocks in the water (splash) for a long time (the name of the activity was throw-rocks-in-the-water-splash!). At one point he looked up at me and said, “I love the water! I love the water!!!” He was just barely two, but he wove a story through the trees that day, too. “I am going to grow big and tall. And when I get older and big, I’ll drive my garbage truck and come and pick up the garbage cans and dump them into the truck!”
I told him, “When you are big and drive your garbage truck to come pick up my garbage, I will come out to watch you dump the garbage cans into the truck, and I will clap for you!” (Luckily some bff emails get hastily etched into the mud beside the riverbank for me to find again years later.)
He has grown so big and tall. The wilderness within him is green and lush as ever, also having grown, expanded in all the ways a teen’s mind does.
Our video calls are now routine, comfortably structured around a game and a book. The book helps us remember wild places, but it isn’t the same as being in one together, with dragons for company. Like the night wakings I didn’t realize I was missing until a stray one reoccurred after months of unbroken sleep, this reintroduction to the storytelling magic of his mind in unstructured moments after months apart catches me off guard. What is this pang of guilt? I had not been grieving the lack of back stage access to his imagination until I got a fresh taste. It tastes like chocolate, mostly sweetness to savor but with an edge of bitter brevity and longing for it to last.
Back near the trailhead, he finds me a butterfly, and beckons me to pause and take photos. We both know his dad is probably waiting, but we stop anyway, not ready to be done. The black-speckled orange wings flit among buttercups and daisies, our eyes dazzled by its color, adjusting to the bright sunlight out from under the old growth canopy. We smile behind our masks at each other; him at the knowledge that his mama is pleased to see butterflies, me at the idea that this could be one of the silverspot butterflies I had read about, and even just the potential of finding something uncommonly rare and endemic to this place helps me alight on the flower of this moment a bit longer, not fly off just yet to what it will feel like to ache for him again for another unknown length of time.
A day lingering among the biggest trees I can find seems a good way to study their supreme patience which I have by no means acquired, even as this wandering quenches the thirst for motion, for travel, for a day set apart from the many days with just the wilderness within to wander. I breathe a prayer on the breeze in the branches, the light on the droplets, the eddies on the edges, for a measure of that patience, that this day may be enough for me and for him of what we have been lacking. Enough of a glimpse at something rare, beautiful, endemic to this place.
“Roughly 80% of your body is water. your body is made of mostly water.” She puts a number on it for him, and it is then that i know i have found the perfect swim teacher for quinn.
She explains not to blow out all his air at once, but to instead hum, letting out small amounts of air at a time. Of course, music helps everything with quinn, even swimming.
In the bedtime dolphin visualization, i tell quinn to relax each muscle and let himself be held and supported by the ocean, to trust the water. I have repeated it like a mantra, a chant, a wish i would have him absorb into his being. “let the water hold you and support you…” it works to lull overactive thoughts into sleep, but he is anything but relaxed when he gets in a pool.
My first job outside of babysitting and farm work was as a lifeguard and teacher of swim lessons. Something about that has held me back from hiring outside help. I’m qualified, i reason. I was on the high school swim team, a scuba diver, a marine biologist, a sailor on the open sea.
I was just as sure my little pisces boy would take to swimming. He’d be a natural. He is a water boy through and through, in love with boats and buoys, fishing and fly-tying, kayaking and canoeing.
But underlying the wateriness of quinn is a murky deep layer of fear, exacerbated by sensory integration challenges. Just this year he has become capable of showering, because he now realizes the loudness and pokiness of the water cascading over his skull and entering his ears (now that he sometimes allows this) is not going to kill him, though he is still pretty sure that any water entering his nostrils will.
One by one, his teacher starts the painstaking work of dispelling his fears. She shows him that every person has a level at which they float, if they do not move at all. For her, it is at nose level. With no effort at all, she is not going to end up on the bottom, but will equilibrate at nose level, like a cork, and she demonstrates for him. She has quinn try this exercise. His string bean build has him floating just under the surface, with nothing but the cowlick of his harry potter hair protruding above. She tells me later that to him, this feels like he is far below the surface, sinking to the bottom, and for now, all he has is her word that he, too, is a cork.
Lesson two
Graceful high schoolers porpoise across the pool, their strokes cutting slices of water to propel them efficiently forward. The coach looks at me like he’s not sure what i’m doing in the bleachers, does not connect my face to anyone in his database of swimmers. I aim my gaze over at the teaching pool, trying to silently communicate to this coach that mine is the upright shivering stick figure, not one of his muscular porpoises.
With so much water all around, i feel salt water in me welling up, threatening to spill over as i watch his teacher turn the rubik’s cube of quinn over in her hands, figuring out how he learns. Like a midwife working to guide a new mother through the task before her, she tries one thing, then another. Her arsenal of strategies is a deep well.
He responds to her instructions without delay, i notice on this second day. He is ready for this, he wants to build this skill. It is not coming easily for him, but he is putting in so much effort.
She drops a weighted object. He throws himself after it, for once forgetting to pinch his fingers to his nose. His body submerged, one hand stretches above the surface, reaching for the wall and safety, but the other long arm has gotten ahold of the weight. He surfaces, lifting it up and out, victorious.
That day i watch him jump in for the first time ever – not holding his ears, just his nose, and after the first try, not trying to bend down and use his hands to maintain a hold on the edge.
Over dinner he explains his logic of how his eyes and mouth can close themselves, but not his nose and ears. He has found he can deal with water in his ears, because it can’t hurt him, but he knows water up his nose can hurt him, so he is still fearful of leaving his nose open. I tell him that even though his nose doesn’t have a physical barrier, it does have a way to make a “door” it’s just that it’s made out of air… but nothing can go in if air is coming out. he says he knows and now he has even experienced it, but his mind doesn’t totally accept and trust that yet. We decide more experience is what he needs to get past that block.
Lesson three
Two days later he jumps in with confidence, lets himself go under on purpose, lets himself stay under the water and come up slowly, starting to trust. She has him do it again, in slightly deeper water, building even more confidence. He holds his nose, sticks his head in the water, and kicks all the way across the width of the pool. He stands up, parts wet hair out of his face, and when his teacher points back to where he started, realizes how far he just propelled himself. he throws his hands up in the air in celebration. He struggles to float on his back for the first half of the lesson, then there he is, lying back into the embrace of the water, letting himself just float. Letting the water hold him and support him. He stays in the pool after his teacher moves on to her next student, pushing himself onto his back to float again and again. He has it in his body now.
Lesson four
He jumps in with wild abandon (and his fingers pinching his nose), again and again, pulling himself up on the edge of the pool with more ease and coordination between his long limbs and his core muscles. The very last jump at the end of the lesson is epic, he nearly cannonballs into the pool, with the goal of reaching the bottom of the 6 foot section where the green torpedo weight beckons for him to retrieve it. Retrieve it he does!
After he finishes the lesson, he comes over and tells me i have to watch him do the squid! I had been watching the whole time, of course, but i watch dutifully as he climbs back in, leans back, glides onto his back, and squids across the pool with a grin on his face.
Lesson five
More squidding, this time underwater. More jumping, more diving for objects, more floating and kicking. More successes, more throwing up his arms in celebration. Afterwards, i ask what he worked on.
“the main thing today was making sure i can flip over from my front to my back.”
“and can you do that now?”
“yup.”
Swim lessons might be about more than just swimming. Lessons about not letting fear hold us back, about being brave, and jumping in. Lessons about miracles, like the solidity of doors made of air, and matter in a liquid state holding up your body weight. (Quinn’s new word: lolid.) Lessons in trust, even when logic might not support it, leaning on it despite having considered all the facts. Lessons about how we can do hard things, if we put in effort. May these lessons cling to him like water from here on out.
This past year has been very transitional for Quinn and for me as a parent. At age ten when he began fifth grade, he was one of the big kids in school. For Christmas I gave him practical, useful gifts – a music stand, a hanger to hold his karate belts. In June, I gathered his friends for a party to commemorate the end of elementary school and to ensure he would have peers to connect with in the big new world of middle school.
last day of 6th grade
At Christmas during sixth grade, with his first year of middle school almost halfway completed, I gave him legos and toys. Anything to lighten up the gravity of the middle school transition and recall the playfulness of childhood. On the last day of school, I gathered him to myself and we made books together, layering repurposed paper from art projects spanning his toddler years, creating journals to chronicle our summer adventures. I anchored him in the embrace of his grandparents to begin the summer, in all the time available before his next adventure launched.
The shuttle of his childhood weft is traversing so quickly back and forth between parent and peers, home and experiences. The warp fibers have all been tenderly and securely strung across the sturdy frame of attachment, their presence now a matter of fact he trusts in without having to think about it. Because the loom is built from good wood and its workings are well oiled, the heddles raise and lower the warp fibers so he doesn’t have to climb up over and duck down under each one, but just moves forward with confidence, his progress unimpeded.
His growing tapestry is both strong and beautiful, and the brightly colored patterns emerging are a delight to my soul. The base colors are lush, suggesting mossy evergreen forests, ferns on riverbanks, farm fields, and oceanic depths across the entire spectrum of green. The layers of stone in gray and brown and tan as he digs more deeply into his interests form outcroppings that offset all the greens. Bright, musical turquoises and golds and reds weave in imaginative zigs and zags. Belts of white, yellow, orange, purple and blue have appeared at regular intervals, solid and sure. The geometric symmetry and complexity of patterns suggests a creativity unbounded by the limits of rational numbers. A red violet tracer strand is an unbroken constant, enfolded into the mix. The growing fabric lays evenly, balanced as a body of water between two shores. The weave is even and neither too loose nor too tight, ensuring the blanket of his childhood will drape comfortably about his shoulders as he wraps it about himself later in life.
The circle of life encompasses all, yet sometimes seems to have a frustratingly small diameter. Walking towards the Chelsea Rose to buy some salmon, my eyes glanced at each plaque lining the bay front, those on the many benches donated in memoriam, as well as the tiles cemented into the sidewalk, defiant attempts at permanence in the face of so much that is fleeting. Many of these engraved names, these painfully abbreviated circumferences, are now familiar to me, not just from walking these blocks, but from hearing them spoken by the voices of many friends or family members i have come to know, who loved and lost the men bearing these names to the sea.
I watched the vividly coral-colored meat parting from the bones willingly and swiftly, the recently living swimmer who would nourish our bodies that night smothered in butter and fresh herbs, and I pondered the difficult geometry of mortality. A floating rectangle beneath me swayed gently, seagulls plunged past on arcs of summer breeze, snatching scraps washed from the working fishing boats docked on this bright monday. Diesel engines and fish processing plants of the town i call home laid a familiar background scent-scape i scarcely registered.
At the beach with my parents an hour earlier, i had picked up a tiny sand dollar, mostly intact, and handed it to my mom. She took a closer look before putting it into her pocket like humans since the beginning of time have known to do, as though bringing back essential minerals within the shell to sustain life ashore. As though. A circle of a shell, remnant of a living being. Its five petals radiating from the center reminded me of the vibrant five-petaled impatiens I had planted before mom’s visit, knowing she always saw their five petals as representing our five-person nuclear family. This floral impression etched in a now-vacant vessel. It crossed my mind how a sand dollar is a little bit reminiscent of the shape of a breast. Life-giving circle. Mostly intact. Flowers, shells, breasts, all fulfill their roles in nature, and yet all are so ephemeral.
Mom recalled visits to jones beach with aunt margie and uncle george, or to oyster bay. She also remembered going to rockaway beach with her mom and dad, “because you could get there by train.” “my earliest memories….” she trailed off, reliving the beaches of New York, where she was taken from the time she was no more than a year old.
Then i was the baby in the memory. “i remember standing in the ocean holding you when you were three months old and telling you, ‘this is a very special place.’ That the water felt cold on my toes but the air was clean and lovely to breathe, that the sound of the water and the birds was so beautiful. I never imagined you would end up living here and all the ocean-related things you would end up doing.”
Then nobody was a baby anymore and we were here, now, 70 and 41, farther around the circle than it seemed like we should be, but sitting side by side on a sunny, deserted beach on a monday gazing at the pacific ocean, its horizon a circle whose extent we could never hope to measure. But we have learned to trust that its diameter is exactly the right length.
