High Summer

It is a beautiful summer night, in this first summer in 9 years that my boy has been home. He leaves exactly a month from yesterday for his freshman year in college, his stepbrother a month after that. I have a hard time thinking about what comes next, what it means to be a sort-of empty nester, though I have had some practice each summer for the last 9 years. I cut all my hair off last week. I applied for a literary grant, am getting my materials together for a moon-shot teaching gig which I am absolutely not famous enough to even be considered for. Academia is--I'd say weird, but really, it is likely normal--but because I was a single mother, because I have had to support my family and work as an administrator and have not had the opportunities to take on visiting professorships, go to writing retreats and conferences and network and put my resources fully toward publishing and establishing myself in the poetry world (three books notwithstanding), I am a fringe candidate at best. But I am able to do the things I love anyway: my little opera company, my choir, my garden, my neglected weedy poems. Maybe I don't need moonshots. Maybe I am already there.

I said to my best friend today, as we walked around campus in the warm July sunshine, that it is perhaps an anomaly that academics, particularly instructors and professors, have so little space between vocation and avocation, between a sense of self and our work. And as a single mother, and now the primary or at least steady wage earner and insurance provider for my family, I do not feel particularly able to pursue what I love as a vocation; rather, that must be done, like the rest of the world, on the margins. William Carlos Williams was a doctor, I tell myself. Ted Kooser is/was an insurance agent. 

But. I am off track, almost immediately. I wanted to tell you how beautiful this summer evening is, how magic if difficult this summer has been. My boy is growing away from me, but growing into himself. Sometimes, we walk the dog and everything I say is met with a sigh and I can hear myself becoming my mother, can hear myself hovering a centimeter above his life. Smothering. Helicoptering. But sometimes, we walk and he points out two birds circling above the rooflines and asks what kind of birds are those? because he knows I love birds and might know. Sometimes, he rescues me from a run where my leg starts hurting so bad I can't go past mile 8, and he pulls up in my car, and drives us home. My god, I love him, and miss him already. I remember those summers when it was just the two of us: how we spent every last hour together, how we waded in rivers and drove to Mackinac Island and by August I sent him to Nature Center camp so we could have some space. How I have never, even now, loved someone so much. But he must change his love for me, and I must change my need for him. 

R. sits beside me on the porch, reading. He lays his hand on my hip at night. 

The garden is producing: fingerling potatoes and zucchini and radish pods I've pickled in my first attempt at pickling; roses and yarrow and abundance where there was once paucity. Every night my boy sits in my garden and watches satellites trace the sky, coyotes and bats and raccoons and neighborhood cats roam the neighborhood. Fit Him, the neighbor who looks like a fitter version of my ex, has apparently taken up the drums and has had a series of what appears to be sex workers in and out of his house. After years of neglect and a failed attempt to sell his house, he's planted a spruce, a hydrangea, stands on his porch with the house and lazily waters the yellowing yard. At work, cormorants and herons and kingfishers guard the dirty pond. I have crocheted my boy a blanket from all of the scraps from every project I have worked on since we started traveling. I am trying to let go, to not believe that catastrophe is around every corner, to believe that letting go means he will disappear. 

I think: I want to plant a tiny orchard along the street. I think: I want to be here forever/I need something to change/holy shit everything is going to change. I run and garden and walk and my body shifts towards whatever comes next: perimenopause and nights when I wake drenched in sweat, my temples starting to grey, my face less round, more lined, more me. Sometimes, I am able to sit at the table on the porch and write. Sometimes, I can hear around the ringing in my head, birdsong. Wind. Pink evening sky after the sun has slipped below the horizon.