Golden Summer

It's been seven years since the first of our three children graduated from high school and the emptying of our nest began.  And every year around this time when graduation is just around the corner, I think about how I felt at the beginning of that summer:

GOLDEN SUMMER

I want a golden summer

before change walks in the door

I want to memorize the days

before one is gone

and two remain.

I want bright blue sunny days

and starry moonlit nights

to laugh and talk and dream and play

before five is four

and life is strange.

I want to wake up early

while the house is still asleep.

I want time to hope and pray

to read and write

and think.

I want the tang of lemonade,

the smoke of barbecue,

the ripe sweet red of berries,

and soft-serve

ice cream cones,

I want to stay up watching movies

and play every game we own.

I want to s t r e t c h out every minute,

and I want time

to s l o w.

I want to bounce with roof balls,

to soar high with a kite,

to skim the air with Frisbee flair,

to dip and skip

in flight.

I want to think about what was

and soak up all that is

before I face the what will be

when summer ends

and change begins.

Playground Day

When my kids were young, once a year, toward the end of summer, we had a day we called Playground Day.  We would pack a picnic lunch and lots of snacks and sports equipment and set out early in the morning to visit all the playgrounds in town.  Back in those days each playground was different.  The one at the school was one of those amazing wooden labyrinth structures.  The one at Barker Playground had a tall metal slide.  Gardner Street Playground was their favorite with its curly slide and wooden merry-go-round.  By the time we got home in the late afternoon, we were hot and tired but happy.  When I was out walking today, I saw that the village has recently installed a new playground on the Hamlet Street side of Russell Joy Park.  It looks just like all the other playgrounds in town.  I know the wooden playground was prone to yellow jackets and splinters.  I know the steps to the tall metal slides were steep and the slides got hot in the sun. And I know kids sometimes tumbled off the merry-go-round when it got going too fast and they weren't holding on tightly enough. I also know the new playground equipment is probably more durable, as well as safer.  But I miss the old playgrounds with all their variety, and I sure do miss our old Playground Days.

Loaves and Fishes

I think one of the things that is hard about an emptying nest is the fact that it’s not really empty.  It’s filled with memories—both good and bad—and regrets.  The good memories warm you and lift your spirits most of the time, but they can also leave an ache inside on a lonely day.   The bad memories make you cringe or cry if you’re not quick enough to brush them away when they creep in at the corners of your mind.  But it’s the regrets that are most dangerous, at least for me.  I worry a lot about the things I got wrong as a parent even though there’s not a thing I can do about them now.  I drive myself crazy thinking about things I didn’t do but should have, things I did but shouldn’t have, and things I should have done differently or better. On a bad day, I can get myself pretty worked up over stuff like this, but here’s what I try to remember in my saner moments: I always did the best I could.  And I remind myself that all my efforts would never have been enough on their own anyway.  It’s like the story of the loaves and fishes from the Bible: on its own, the boy’s lunch was nowhere close to being enough, but in Jesus’s hands, it fed thousands.  The boy gave all he had, and God did the rest.  So I continue to trust and pray that God will take the loaves and fishes of my parenting and use them to work miracles in the lives of my children, despite the mistakes I made and the missteps I took along the way.

Wilbur

Wilbur arrived one spring day when Ben was about eighteen months old. An eccentric aunt had put him in a big cardboard box and used up a big chunk of her meager means to mail him to her first grandnephew.  Ben fell in love with him immediately. He drank his bottle leaning up against Wilbur; he sat in Wilbur's lap and read books to himself.  He chose to be Wilbur for Halloween the following year.  Since Wilbur was so big, he didn't often go places with us physically, but he was always with us in spirit.  When we grocery-shopped, Ben would call out, "Ra-a-a-w fish.  Wilbur wants ra-a-a-w fish" when we passed the seafood section.  When we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Pennsylvania, and it started to storm, Ben would frown and say, "Wilbur hates thunderstorms." Wilbur quickly became more than a favorite stuffed animal, he was one of the family.  So when most of the other stuffed animals got packed up and moved to the attic when Ben got older, Wilbur stayed happily in the corner of the room.  He tried to sneak along when Ben was packing for college but didn't make the cut.  Instead he waited patiently for Ben to return.  Ben's first apartment after graduation was very small, and there was no room for a big polar bear in Ben's tiny bedroom, so Wilbur stayed behind again.  But this week, Ben moved to a new place, a place of his own, a place with plenty of room for old friends. And once again, Wilbur is sitting happily in the corner of Ben's room.

Job Descriptions

When my kids were little, my role as a parent was clear.  It was up to me to love them, feed them, teach them, play with them, read to them, keep them clean, and keep them safe.  Now that they are young adults, my job description is less clear and my list of responsibilities is quite a bit shorter.  Some days this leaves me feeling a little obsolete.  I think this is one of the hardest things to adjust to when your children leave home.  Yet when I look back over the years since I left home myself, I’m reminded of how many times my parents and my husband’s parents were anything but obsolete.  For example, during our first winter in New Hampshire when we were reluctant to turn on our heat since we weren’t sure our minimum-wage jobs would cover the bill, my husband’s parents drove for nine hours to bring us a trunkful of firewood for the fireplace in our bedroom.  A few years later when our oldest child was our only child, he took a bite of soap while he was in the bathtub one day.  The soap left such a bad taste in his mouth he refused to eat or drink anything else, and almost before we knew it, he ended up in the hospital with dehydration.  My husband and I were sitting there by his hospital bed feeling lost and alone when we heard footsteps coming down the corridor: my dad's familiar shuffle accompanied by the click-click of my mom's Sunday heels.  My parents had driven up from Pennsylvania to take care of us while we took care of our son. Later on, both of our moms came to cook and clean and care for us when our other children were born and when we moved from one house to another and when I had surgery for thyroid cancer.  So I’m thinking maybe my job description now is this: show up when they need you.  This week, for me, it meant editing a May term paper via email for my daughter, providing phone support to my younger son who was in the midst of buying a used car on his own for the first time, and helping my older son assemble furniture and unload couches for his new apartment.  I’m not sure what it will mean in the future, but this I know: I want the job forever.

More Things I Keep Under My Bed

Although my dad had many health problems throughout his adult life, his death at age 70 came with little warning.  When he died, I learned that no matter how old you are, you’re never ready to lose a parent.  In the years since, I’ve learned that you never stop missing the parent you lost, and you never stop thinking of things you wish you could tell him.  At first, I saw him everywhere—in a stranger’s shuffle, in a colleague’s gray head, in the faces of my children.  I also talked about him to anyone who would listen.  And I wrote about him: poems, journal entries, stories.  Before we left town after his funeral, I took pictures of his room, especially his little office area: desk, chair, bookcase, file cabinet.  I also gathered up a few things of his to keep: one of the plaid short-sleeve shirts he always wore, the red chamois shirt he’d been wearing over Christmas, a New Testament that belonged to him and had his name scrawled inside in his distinctive handwriting, one of his pocket knives, a pair of black leather driving gloves he’d been wearing that still held the curve of his hands, a silver pen light he’d used for years.   I also took the contents of the file marked “Mindy” from his file cabinet; among other things, the manila folder held cards I’d made for him, postcards I’d sent from camp, notes I’d left for him or tucked into his suitcase, an index card with my various addresses written on it, and a green triangle made of poster board to which I’d taped ten silver half dollars and given to him as a Father’s Day gift once.  When I got back home, I put all of these things in a little flowered duffle bag, along with the sympathy cards I’d received, the obituary from the newspaper, and a poem I’d written and read at his funeral.  Every once in a while during that first year, I unzipped the bag just a little and breathed in the scent of my dad that still clung to those shirts.  In the years since then, I haven’t opened it at all—until today.  The bag was covered in dust, so I carefully took everything out and washed the bag.  I’ll tuck everything back inside as soon as the bag is dry, and I’ll put it back under my bed.  And for the rest of the night and the rest of my life, I’ll think of the dad I had and all the things he gave me that don’t fit in the little flowered bag: memories of playing blocks and four-square and push-the-button; strong, abiding faith in God; an uncompromising model of honesty and integrity, security that comes from knowing someone was always in my corner; and the strength that comes from knowing I was a well-loved child. And I'll do my best to pass these things along to my own kids.

Things I Keep in a Box Under My Bed

I have two old plastic snap cases under my bed.  One of them holds cast-off and never-used school supplies: a plastic protractor, spiral notebooks, page protectors, folders, erasers, and index cards.  For years it was the place the kids ransacked when they all of a sudden needed something for homework or for school the next day.  We all still rummage through it from time to time, so I suppose it will stay there awhile longer.  The other dusty snap case holds treasures.  In it are notes from the kids from over the years ("Mommy, I think I left my jeans at track!" "Dear tooth fairy, we lost my tooth and can’t find it . . . " "Hey there, Ma . . . just hoping you have a good week while we’re in FLA" "Mom, get me up at 5:45 or whenever you get up . . . I got work to do!").  It also holds pictures they drew, stories they wrote, tapes they made, and notebooks they kept.  There's a paper flower on a paper stem, one of the first things my oldest son ever made me and a little spray of fake flowers, the first present he ever bought me.  The box also houses three composition notebooks, one for each of my kids.  I started writing letters to them in 1991.  At first I wrote several times a year; later on I wrote less frequently, often around their birthdays.  The last entries are from 2009.  In each entry, I tried to capture who they were at that moment—I recorded things they said, things they did, favorite foods and games and TV shows.  My original plan was to give the notebooks to them when they left for college, but the timing didn't seem quite right.  Then I thought I might give them to them when they graduated from college, but I didn’t do that either.  I can’t quite decide just when they will be most ready to read them.  When they turn 30?  When they have kids of their own?  I guess when the time is right, I'll know it.  For now, they’ll stay in the box I keep under my bed.

Backyard Gardens

When we bought our house eighteen years ago, one of the things we liked about it was the backyard.  It was enclosed by leafy hedges and flowering trees, and there were five colorful flower beds, artfully arranged and carefully maintained.  My mom had always gardened, so I knew a little bit about flowers and vegetables and wasn’t too worried about caring for the gardens.  The former owners of the house were teachers who had no children, and as we found out later, they spent most of the summer months tending the gardens.  The flower beds contained scores of annual flowers and many beautiful, but fussy, perennials.  Taking care of not one, but five flower gardens while taking care of not one, but three children turned out to a BIG job.  I tried hard to maintain what the former owners had started, but I was no match for the time and expertise they possessed.  Little by little, the fussy flowers died out, and when I bought new perennials to grow in their place, I learned to look for "hearty" and "grows well in poor soil" on the label. I tried to keep the kids and the dog and the footballs, Frisbees, and soccer balls out of gardens, but it was a losing battle.  When the kids were young and the backyard was their world, they used to help me garden.  They each had their own garden to care for.  They helped plant and care for the flowers they had picked out, and they cheerfully carted weeds to the compost pile.  As they grew older and busier, and started spending their summers at playground programs, soccer fields, friends' houses, and eventually jobs, their gardening participation dropped off—though one of my fondest memories from that time is when my middle child appeared with a Tupperware cup of lemonade for me while I was working in his (former) garden.  As their lives branched out, mine did, too.  Since they weren’t spending as much time in the backyard, neither was I, and the gardens became weedier and wilder.  Our neighbor in those years was an avid gardener with no children.  Her garden won contests.  It was a blaze of color.  Her feverfew, flax, gaillardia, and poppies looked like they had jumped out of my gardening book and into her yard.  She taught me a lot about flowers and gardening over the years, but maybe the most important lesson she taught me came once when I was despairing over the state of my unkempt gardens, compared to her showpiece.  She looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re not raising flowers, Mindy, you’re raising children.”  Her words helped me let myself off the hook when it came to the unruly flower beds.  But now that my kids are mostly raised, I’m thinking it’s time to start spending more time in the backyard again—maybe, if I’m lucky, one of my kids will join me or will at least bring me a class of cool lemonade!

SUNY Fredonia

Soon after we were married, my husband and I took our theatre degrees and moved to New Hampshire.  My husband found work as a custom picture framer at Rowland's Art Studio, and I waitressed at the Millstone, sold furniture at Pompanoosuc Mills, sold clothing at Serendipity, and worked as a receptionist at Concord Electric. After a couple of years, we decided we wanted careers, rather than jobs, so we moved to Fredonia to get teaching degrees at the college here.  Things were going according to plan until our first child surprised us; I decided I didn’t want to teach high school English while I had a newborn at home, so I dropped the certification part of my plan but continued taking graduate classes in English.  While I was working toward my M.A., the English department hired me as a teaching assistant, and I remember walking around campus daydreaming what life would be like as a faculty member.  I even used to imagine what it would feel like to drop my son off at the Campus Community Children’s Center—I could almost feel his little hand in mine.  When I finished my degree, the English department hired me as a part-time adjunct instructor.  Early on, I taught at night, so I never ended up dropping off any of my kids at the campus day care center.  Later, after my kids were all in school, I switched to daytime teaching.  When my oldest child was in middle school, I used to imagine what it would be like to see him walking across campus as a college freshman.  The years rolled on, and as it turned out, none of my kids ended up spending their college years at Fredonia.  But my oldest is now a grad student here, and every once in a while I see him in the parking lot or walking into the building next to mine.  After twenty-four years as a faculty member and twenty-five years as a parent, I don’t do much daydreaming about the future anymore—maybe it’s because the next stage is too hard for me to imagine or maybe it’s because life has turned out to be better than my daydreams.  But I do know that as I walked away from Fenton Hall today, at the end of another academic year,  I was counting my blessings.

Paper Mom

      After tossing and turning half the night as the wind howled and the rain hurled itself against the windows and roof, I was already awake when my old clock radio clicked on suddenly and softly at 5:00 a.m.  I stumbled out of bed, reaching for my glasses, watch, and bathrobe.  When I tapped lightly on the door to Ben's room, I heard his muffled voice say, "I'm awake."

"Dress in layers, and wear your new hiking boots," I suggested. Trying to offer some encouraging words, I added, "It probably can't get much worse than this. If you can make it through this morning with the wind and the cold rain and the heavy Sunday papers, you'll be ready for anything."

A few minutes later, we were sitting side by side on the living room, putting the papers together, rolling them, and stuffing them into the wafer thin plastic bags. I was sipping a mug of tea, and Ben was huddled on the heater while we waited for the house to warm up. About a third of the way through the stack of papers, we both realized he could never fit all the thick Sunday papers into his paper bag at once. 

"How am I going to get all these over there?" Ben wondered aloud.

"I'll drive you," I answered immediately.

A few minutes passed as we continued to roll and stuff. Then Ben said, "Do you think you could stay with me today? I could leave my list in the car and just take a few papers at a time. I wouldn't ask you to normally, but I'm not sure how I can do this myself today."

"Sure, I'd just be sitting here waiting for you to get back anyway." 

Armed with flashlights, raincoats, and two extra bags of papers, we crept out into the dark, cold morning that still felt a lot like nighttime. We discovered the rain had recently been freezing rain, and the sidewalks were icy and slippery. 

As Ben made his way from house to house, picking up speed as the sky lightened and the rain turned to drizzle, I followed in the Subaru, supplying him with papers and house numbers. He was wearing a stocking hat, and because he hasn't worn a hat since he started middle school and began worrying about messing up his carefully gelled hair, he looked like a bigger version of a much younger self to me. I felt my emotions welling up as I watched him carefully navigating the slippery sidewalks and conscientiously putting the papers where his customers had asked him to put them. Every so often he'd look back at me and grin. 

So was it the way I would have chosen to begin my Sunday morning? No. But I realized in the midst of it, there was really nowhere else I wanted to be.  

It’s been eleven years since that cold, wet Sunday morning at the beginning of my son’s year-and-a half-long stint as a paper boy. I think of it every time I walk the streets that were part of his route. I can’t say I was sorry when he gave up his route at the end of the following summer. It was a relentless job that ended up involving our whole family at one point or another. But he learned a lot about working hard, being responsible, and managing money and people. And I learned a lot about what it means to support your kids as they make their way through life.

Tea, Toast, and Razor Scooters

Sixth grade was a tough year for my son—too much tedious homework and too little joy.  I told my dad about his struggle on the phone part way through the school year, and he suggested that we offer him a reward for making it through a tough situation.  Any time he had an overwhelming amount of homework on a school night, he was supposed to mark it on the calendar, and at the end of the school year, he could trade in all of his frustration for a reward: something big, my dad said, something worth working for.   We decided on a Razor scooter, something my son had been wanting that we couldn’t afford.  There was one catch: no complaining.  Many nights that year, my son stomped down the stairs, made an angry “x” on the calendar and stomped back up, but overall, life was more peaceful.  And now, instead of remembering a bad year in school, he remembers a clever, loving grandpa.  I needed some help solving that problem, but most of the other little troubles of childhood, I could fix with tea and toast or a colorful Band-aid or a night of pizza and videos.  One of the hard things about being the parent of adult children is that now when they are sad or sick or lonely or frustrated or heartbroken, I can’t fix things—the troubles are too big or the pain too deep.  I can pray for them and encourage them.  I can listen and offer advice.  But mostly they have to get better or figure things out on their own. I realized, though, when telling this story, that when my dad found a way to help my son through his sixth grade year, he ended up helping me, too.  So maybe my days of fixing things for my kids aren't completely over either.

Sunday Dinners

When I rolled out of bed on the Sunday mornings of my childhood, I’d find my mom in the kitchen browning the meat or chopping the vegetables or making the salad for Sunday Dinner. Before we left for Sunday school, she had Swiss steak or pork roast or beef-carrots-potatoes-and-onions in the oven or on the stove or in the electric skillet. As soon as we got home from church, she would put on an apron and whip into action, and by 1:00, we’d be sitting down to a big meal. When my own kids were young, we often went to my husband’s parents’ house for Sunday Dinner. At their house, dinner was the evening meal, a big dinner that my mother-in-law had spent much of her afternoon preparing. After my husband's dad died, we started having Sunday dinner here, but it wasn’t quite the event it had been when my mom or my mother-in-law was doing the cooking—it was just another dinner, not Sunday Dinner. Then for a little while when our kids were in high school, two of my friends and I took turns hosting Sunday Dinner for all three families, but when our kids started leaving for college, that came to an end. In the last year or so, a new Sunday Dinner tradition has been quietly taking root in our family. I think it started during football season when Ben, the child who lives nearby, would come over after church to watch football and do his laundry. For years while the kids were growing up, Friday night was pizza night, but when we stopped having kids at home, we stopped ordering pizza on Friday nights. Yet we still had a fondness for pizza, so on one of those Sunday afternoons, we decided to get pizza and bread sticks during the second game. Then a couple of weeks later, we remembered how good that pizza had tasted, and I remembered how nice it was to sit and watch football instead of making dinner, so we decided to order pizza again, this time with chicken wings. Now, more often than not, we eat pizza for Sunday Dinner. And I’ve decided to stop feeling guilty that I don’t have dinner in the oven when I leave for church or that I don’t spend all of Sunday afternoon cooking a big meal. I’ve finally realized that Sunday Dinner isn’t about the food, it’s about the memories—and for us, for now, pizza works just as well as pork roast.

Endings

I’ve been feeling unsettled ever since I woke up this morning. And it’s taken me a while to figure out why. Today was the last day of classes at the college where I teach.  I should be breathing a sigh of relief, right?  But I’m not, and it’s not just because I still have exam week and many, many hours of grading ahead of me.  Tonight my daughter is coming home from college.  I should be kicking up my heels—after all, I’ve been counting down the days.  So why am I feeling little pangs of sadness?  I spent the day teaching classes, going to meetings, talking to colleagues, and saying good-bye to students.  Then I rushed home with the van so my husband could go meet my daughter at her dorm, pack up her things, and bring her home.  He’s on his way now, and I’m sitting here trying to make sense of my feelings.  This is what I’ve come up with so far:  I don’t like the ends of things.  I’m ready for a break from the breathless pace of the academic year, but I’m going to miss the students I’ve had for several semesters and may never see again.  I can’t wait for my daughter to get home, but it makes me sad to think of her moving out of the cute little dorm room she’s lived in for the past two years—it feels like the beginning of the end of her college years.  The end of the academic year also means the retirement of wonderful professors who have devoted their professional lives to sharing what they know with thousands of students over decades of teaching: my daughter’s favorite math professor, an adjunct buddy of mine who started just one semester before I did, and a dear mentor who was first my professor and then my colleague.  So yes, endings are tough for me.  They leave me feeling a little unsettled, a little nostalgic, and a little sad over the loss of what was.  But, as we know, endings often make way for beginnings—new experiences, new possibilities, new dreams.  So I will try to look back with fondness and look ahead with hope.  As for right now, I think I’ll kick up my heels a little—my girl is on her way home!

Grocery Store Blues

Odd as it might sound, one of the places that made me feel sad when each of my kids first left for college was the grocery store.  I suppose it was the connection between how much time I had spent over the years feeding each of those full-grown kids and the realization that now I wouldn’t be doing it anymore that led to the bewildering sense of loss I felt as I pushed my cart through the store.  And it didn’t get any easier with experience—each child’s absence brought on the same rush of emotion.  I would see the Kaiser rolls in the bakery that my oldest child took in his lunch for years, or I’d push my cart past the Gatorade display and think of the gallons I’d bought for my middle child, or I’d see the blue boxes of Oatmeal Squares that I’d bought every week for years for my youngest, and before I knew it, my eyes would be misting up.  This went on aisle after aisle, food after food: bags of Empire apples, Goldfish crackers, Chips Deluxe Rainbow cookies, s’more granola bars, and key lime yogurt.  And then I’d start remembering all the years of going grocery shopping with my kids, especially the younger two who used to munch their way through the aisles, starting with pizza from the Carry-Out Café and ending with donuts from the bakery. So by the time I got to the dairy aisle, I'd be sniffling a little and even wiping away a tear or two, as kindly fellow shoppers gave me curious but sympathetic looks.  Eventually, I got used to a shorter grocery list, and now I can get through a shopping trip with nary a tear!  But I have to admit, there’s a bounce in my step when one of my kids is coming home, and I get to stock up on some of their favorite foods again.

The Orange Bowl

As I was walking today, I paused to look at the Orange Bowl.  To an outsider, it might look like a run-down, maybe even abandoned, football field, but to those who live here, the Orange Bowl is the proud home of the Fredonia Hillbillies.  It sits at the bottom of the hill that leads up to what was, until recently, Wheelock Primary School.  But before Wheelock Primary School, it was the site of Fredonia High School.  Many years ago, the team name was Hilltoppers, or so we've been told, presumably because the school was on the top of West Main Hill.  When and why we became the Hillbillies, I do not know, but we wear our black and orange with pride!   The high school is now on the other side of town, but the Orange Bowl remains.  Although we don’t have a fancy synthetic turf field surrounded by a new all-purpose track, and although bleachers and press box are old and rickety, and although when it rains (which is often), the incline gets so muddy, the superintendent has been known to stand guard and give people a hand up, I love the Orange Bowl.  As I stood by the fence, my mind went back to when our family was young and we lived in a house right near the field.  On game nights, we used to walk down the street and spend a few minutes watching the Hillbillies in action from the fence while the kids ran up and down the hill.  A few years later when the kids were older, we started going to the home games; we had moved by then, but our house was still within walking distance, so on crisp fall nights, we walked through town to the Orange Bowl.  For years our kids were in the band and in the stands with their friends, and we were there, too, cheering the Hillbillies on.  But then the last Wendell graduated from Fredonia High School.  We’ve been back a time or two since, but I know fewer and fewer of the players on the field and the parents in the stands.  So I’m back to watching from the fence for a few minutes on Friday nights during football season.  And on this misty Tuesday afternoon in May when the only activity on the field is a couple of grazing groundhogs, I find myself hoping the Orange Bowl stays exactly the way it is for another generation of Hillbillies.