Summer in a Moment

June 29th

I told R. that I haven't been able to sleep the past two nights--up in the thin hours with panic-brain. It's pretty hard to find something to panic about these days, he said. 

Of course, I can panic about anything. He and D. are heading to Armenia today and then to Cambridge where D. will be spending the summer on study abroad. We briefly had a discussion of me joining them in London for a few days, but complicating factors (my passport was lost years ago, and is most definitely expired anyway; planning an international trip in a few weeks was enough to send me into a tailspin. Instead, we decided to move our future-Europe trip up to next summer.

Anyway, I still don't like him leaving because I only know how to catastrophize, but I'm also glad D. isn't going alone.

Anyway. R. is right though--after a year (and honestly, the decade before that) of panic, things are...normal. J. is home for the summer and applying for any job he can find. Today he interviewed at my college to be a swim instructor (fun fact: I taught swimming lessons for a few summers in high school too. Funner fact: I can't swim and am actually terrified of the water. Anyway, the Deerfield Park District never asked if I could swim and my best friend who already worked there vouched for me and I remember I had Red Cross first aid and CPR training but anyway, wouldn't send my kid there for swimming lessons). 

J. is up in his bedroom playing his guitar; earlier, we made dinner and I baked a loaf of bread and did a little weeding and watered the chickens who are happily eating worms or whatever they can find in the twilit chicken pen; I went for a short, slow, hot run; I sang through some Barber and Vaughan Willians and Saint-Saens and Elgar now that choir season is done and I'm back working on theoretical opera auditions.

Last weekend was graduation; I wore my purloined gown and stole and sat with a few of my faculty and my dean friends and then ran a long, ugly 11 miles up Mt. Tabor and went to an opera board meeting and realized: things are okay. I am okay in my job right now, I am writing, sort of; I am singing in one of the best choirs of my life; I am still involved with the opera though cannot perform until maybe 2025 due to scheduling conflicts (and whether or not I'm cast); my boy is here and safe and salvaged his freshman year of college and is not the boy who I left at Lewis and Clark in the fall but someone else who learned he can do hard things, learned he is safe and that we aren't going anywhere.

We haven't been to the Midwest in over a year, which is the longest I've been away from home. Home? I don't know. Home is here, this chosen place of basalt and fern and fir and ocean and cold rivers.  Home is also cicadas and humidity and the Lake and folks who sound like Chicago or Michigan. I have felt like an outsider where I have been, but in Portland I feel like I belong, or as close to belonging as I can imagine.

I look at my face in the mirror and I do and do not feel 47. I feel the same as I did at 19, my boy's age; as I did at 32, department chair and single mom. But R. is right--I don't feel so afraid right now. I am somewhat afraid to write that, as if it will jinx things. 47 years of believing happiness is for other people. That safety cannot exist without terror.

Oh, terror exists. I cannot deprogram my brain and the world is terrible and america is terrible and to be a woman in america is terrible. I have been close to panic and tears most of this week. R. and D. are busy planning their trip, J. is off with friends. 

After a season of concerts and book excitement and the chaos of spring quarter, I am adrift without anything to do but go to work at an empty campus.  I miss Mr. Bill. I miss him so much. I keep thinking of those last moments, how my dog who couldn't stay still to be held was knocked out, heavy and limp in my arms, how I sobbed and sobbed and felt (feel, still) so much regret for how little patience I had for him, so much terror about facing life without him. 

July 6th

R. and D. have been gone for a week and it's just been J and me at home. Quiet, cool and rainy and now the sudden blast furnace of summer. Last summer was the first since he was 8 that he was home, but last year was fraught with anxiety and worry. Now, it's been peaceful, as if we had stepped back into the life I was trying to create for us then. Have been trying to build for us all along, but it's suddenly whole, no longer torn down the middle. He goes out with his friends, comes home after midnight and slips his cowboy boots off before walking in the door, turns off the lights, whispers goodnight, i'm home as he walks up the attic stairs to his bedroom. We walk through the neighborhood, we play cards and eat dinner and talk. I ask him if he's spoken to his father--yes, briefly. I ask, hesitantly, if he thinks he'll ever go back. He shrugs. I doubt it, he says. So, I say, forcing you to travel for years hasn't had the payout he was hoping? You're a smart cookie, he says and deals another round of rummy. R. texts from Armenia--exhausted, his bag lost for the first three days, vacillating from deep homesickness to muted joy.  This morning, he texted from England, a day away from dropping D. off at Cambridge for the summer, and then R. will be on his way home Sunday.

I ran my annual half marathon on the Fourth; finished strong but slow and then have spent two days wiht a blood pressure crash and sore legs. The sky is pearl and pink. J is upstairs in his room working on a charcoal drawing, every neighbor's air conditioner whispering.

August 31st

It is eight o'clock and the sky is dark. I am alone on the porch, the air still hot and still. J's friends are starting to clear out of town, he's done with his summer of teaching swimming lessons at the college, both boys head back in a few weeks to school. When I was a little kid, i knew that when I heard crickets at night and Queen Anne's lace started to bloom in roadside ditches, and we gathered the family to go to Northbook Days to see my uncle's band play, that it was almost time for school to start. When I was teaching, this would have been the last weekend before the semester began. Now, I have two weeks of dead time before faculty come back for inservice, before the campus is populated with students and faculty again. I miss that--teaching. I know I'm good at being a dean for whatever that's worth, but I miss having students, writing syllabi, getting ready to walk into a classroom full of strangers. 

I have been absent from this space for a while, for most of this summer, because I needed to disengage, because something is changing but i don't know what/in the past I have simply uprooted my life every 10 years but now I am safe and don't want to uproot, because I wanted to be with my boys, with my boy, to be alive in the moment. Somewhere in these months, R and I went to the mountains to write, J started his first job,  I ran and walked and there was a neighborhood donkey near Mt. Tabor! and worked in the garden and played video games, and R and I went to restaurants and new bars though I am barely drinking anymore, and i felt not at all like a writer, or a lot like a writer, or not at all like a singer or a lot like a singer, and harvested a crap ton of plums from our tree and baked countless loaves of bread, and now it's almost September. 

Anyway, something is being uprooted but for the first time, I'm not sure what.

There are crickets, distant traffic, the neighbor's outdoor birthday party, I'm geriatric! I'm 36! the host exclaimed loudly a moment ago.

I'm 47. I feel both ancient and too young for any of this. There are crickets and laughter and distant traffic and stars that wink on one by one in the southern sky.  Here we are. Now, now, now.