Yesterday felt like the first day of summer.
We left town on Friday night, splurging on a hotel in Spokane so we would have the luxury of arriving in Bozeman before dinner, as opposed to our usual habit of rolling in around midnight. It was completely worth it. We lingered over coffee downtown, and Suzannah played on the red wagon slide in Riverfront Park. It felt so good to wander along the still-quiet sidewalks downtown with my baby, the sun on my arms, anticipating the relatively easy drive through the mountains.
This is the beauty of the road: all of my anxiety vanishes. I do plenty of hand-wringing before we actually leave on any of our trips -- about packing, or expenses, or driving, or any number of things I won't bother to disclose here because I don't need to make myself sound more neurotic than I already am. But once we're on the interstate, it all falls away as easily as the signs in the rearview mirror. Driving out of Coeur d'Alene, the lake huge and brilliant and blue, the mountains rising before us, I realized that nothing could compete with the sheer perfection of this day. I wasn't worried about whether or not I should have signed my teaching contract or any of the things that stress me out in my daily life. I wasn't thinking about all the "what-if's" of my Future (yes, with a capital F). There was only the road, the sunshine, the water. The warm coffee in my hands, the satisfying bulk of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest on my lap. There was my baby boy's soft, fat feet kicking happily in the back seat and his big sister examining her new robot Band-Aid with no small amount of pride, recounting -- again -- the story of how she fell down and skinned her knee at the park, how Daddy kissed it.
The clouds rolled in between Missoula and Butte, and we drove through hard rain on the Butte pass, rain as loud as hail that drowned out all attempts at conversation. Montana rain smells sharp and clean even from inside the car. I miss these summer storms -- the booming thunder, the flashes of lightning in the nearly-black sky, and afterwards, the sudden sunshine.
By the time we pulled into the driveway at my parents' house, the clouds had parted over the hills and the sun was shining on the wet grass. After dinner, Matt asked if I felt like going for a walk, since Suzannah was busy playing with Grandma and ALL THE TOYS! and Isaac was asleep (because my second child does this bizarre thing where I lay him down and he smiles and babbles for awhile and then just -- goes to sleep. It's weird. I'm still trying to understand how that works). Suddenly, though, all I wanted to do was put on my running shoes and jog up the highway alone in the cool evening air.
I've jogged that highway at dusk many, many times. It's one little thing I do for myself when I come to this place I still consider home even though I haven't really lived here since I was eighteen. Every time I pull off I-90, my town looks a little different. For awhile, there was a shiny new bank every time I came home. Then, when they decided there were enough of those, they started building strip malls with all the same big chain stores and restaurants you'd find anywhere else in the country. I suppose Bozeman needs The Gap and Cost Plus World Market and Costco and little teriyaki restaurants or whatever, but I hate change, so I try to ignore it. Plus, part of me turns into the crazy lady that wants to yell at all the teenagers in town, "Oh, poor you, you don't think there's enough shopping here? Well, when I was your age, you know what the brand-new thing in town was? WAL-MART. And it was a BIG FAT SHINY DEAL."
My parents live south of town, and when we first moved to Bozeman, there wasn't much between us and town besides fields and farms. Subdivisions have grown up there in the last several years, though, as well as a few churches and some traffic lights. (Hey, kids. When I lived here, I could drive all the way to Main without hitting a traffic light. That's eight miles away. A four-way stop was good enough for us, and you think you need a four-lane road now? And a left-turn arrow? Get off my lawn.)
But there are still a few fields left near my parents' house. In the winter, you might see a bull elk and his harem just off the road as you drive into town. And in the summer, when I jog up the highway, if I stop where it curves a mile from the house, I have a view of Gallatin Valley and the Bridger mountains that looks more or less the same as it did ten years ago. And the air smells just as sweet. And it's so quiet.
It felt so good to turn off the tree-lined lane that leads to my parents' house and on to the highway, to run in the cool evening air, the gravel still damp from the recent storm. The sun had settled warmly over the foothills and my shadow stretched to the other side of the road. I ran a mile-and-a-half towards town before I decided to turn around; by then the sun had set and the wind had picked up again. I jogged home in the fading light, feeling surprisingly energetic for having spent the entire day in the car.
I burst through the front door to see Colleen, one of my oldest friends, sitting on the couch. She was chatting with my parents, and she rose to give me a hug before she demanded that I find her some cookies and milk. Then she made fun of me for giving her milk in a little green plastic cup. ("Gee, Shar," she said. "This is different from the glass you might have picked a few years ago.") This is the friend who sat next to me in geometry in the ninth grade, who stood up in my wedding, and who still winds up eating cookies at my house at strange hours. The year after Matt and I were married, we were all in town for Christmas. She let herself in to my parents house at some obscene hour of the morning that week, and we woke up to her body sailing into bed with us.
"Hey, Sweetie. I hope your husband has pants on," she said.
"Uh, all good here," said Matt, who was vaguely horrified but probably not all that surprised.
Last night, after Suzannah went through her usual bedtime antics (equal parts stalling and showing off for company), Colleen turned to me and said, "Hm. A bossy, particular, intense little child who looks exactly like you? Weird."
It was another little reminder -- in the form of a hug, a few insults, and lots of laughter -- that some things never really change, and that feeling? That's home.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
These bittersweet moments
This time of year makes me feel so wistful, it almost hurts.
It's sweet, mostly. A little bittersweet. There's something about the smell of these first summer days that has me remembering all the other summers of my life. Walking with my babies to the park, the sun on my bare arms this afternoon becomes the sun on my arms during finals week at the end of my freshman year of college as I walked to Dairy Queen with my friends and thought about packing up my first dorm room. The way my hair brushes against my neck reminds me of the afternoon I chopped off all my long hair (and in those days, it was blonde, like my daughter's) shortly before I graduated from high school. Some things are constant: the smells of grass and backyard barbecues, the sounds of lawn mowers and sprinklers and birds. The way the late-afternoon light filters through the trees at the park. It's the summer of 2010, but it's also, say, the summer of 2007, when Suzannah and I would take the same walk almost every single afternoon, shadows sliding across the sidewalk, the same scent of the evergreens in the air. We used to stop at Metropolitan Market, simply because it was cool and it was on our way home. We'd wander the aisles and sample cheese or fresh fruit before heading home to make dinner. Metro Market's closing this past winter makes me sad not so much because I'll miss their coffee or their deli (although I will), but because I'll miss the possibility of wandering through with my girl -- and, now, my boy -- on these summer afternoons.
Three years ago I wrote in Suzannah's journal, We exist purely in the moment: this July sun, this breeze, this beautiful life in which time becomes something both wispy and almost tangible, like a slice of peach. I wonder what I did with myself before I had you. I wonder why I didn't take enough notice of the moments in which I simply existed in a warm afternoon, or thought that it somehow wasn't enough.
I had a moment of melancholy this afternoon as we walked, the kind that almost always comes with nostalgia: a longing for those moments that have become perfect in my memory, knowing they can never exactly be repeated. I've been thinking a lot about last summer and being pregnant with Isaac, which was one of the sweetest times of my life. (Memory conveniently edits out the parts about feeling exhausted and overheated, or having to take Zofran in order to combat the "morning" sickness that never really ended.) I think, I'll never have that again, in exactly that way.
Of course, what I have now is just as sweet: a baby in my arms and his big sister's hand in mine. Quieter evenings have been replaced with chaos and noise that is joyful as often as it is frustrating. And I also know that someday, I will remember these days with deep longing too (and probably not far into the future, as I often feel deeply nostalgic for Isaac's newbornness just six short-yet-momentous months ago -- even though I wouldn't trade what I have now, the happy shrieks, the cuddles, the joyful baby my second child has become).
Next weekend, we'll load up the car and head out for our annual road trip. We're going early this year, and we're driving all the way to Minneapolis. We haven't driven that far in years, but I know it's going to flood me with the same feelings of nostalgia and deep longing that most of our road trips do, because we'll be tracing the routes that lead us both back to where we've lived most of our lives, both separately and together. There are memories on the road, and depending on where we're at I can slip so easily back into being twenty-one, or fifteen, or twelve.
Another reason I'm feeling more than a little nostalgic: Today, my little girl had her very first haircut. Yes, she made it all the way past her fourth birthday without having so much as a trim. But she was practically bald for the first two years of her life, so -- I just haven't been able to bring myself to get it cut until now. And I love her hair, her baby curls at the end, a wild golden mass trailing down her back.
It really was time. When it's wet, it nearly reaches her butt. It's hard to rinse in the tub. She'll hardly let me touch it with a brush, much less let me do things with it (although it should be noted that her daycare providers would send her home in cute little braids and things all the time). If we're doing an art project or something, she'll let me tie it back in a pony tail so she doesn't get paint or glue in it, but as soon as she's finished she'll yank it right out. (Funnily enough, when she was two and her hair was just beginning to grow, when she had just enough to pin back with little clips, she couldn't get enough of her hair bows. Grandma Griffith gave her a card with about a dozen colored hair bows, and for awhile she wouldn't go to bed at night until every single one of them was clipped in her hair. By the time she was a flower girl in her uncle's wedding, shortly before her third birthday, she allowed us to clip her hair back with a pretty bow to match her dress -- and it stayed in for about five minutes.)
But even though it's this wild mass of blonde tangles half the time, I really do love her hair. I love how it flows behind her when she runs, the way it sticks to her cheeks when she's sweaty or just waking up. I love the way she brushes it impatiently out of her face. (I don't particularly love the way she hollers, "OW, OW!" if I so much as hold a brush near her head, but whatever.)
I haven't wanted to push the trim, though. I don't really want her hair to be a source of power struggles, since we have enough of those. I wanted her to be involved in the decision to have it trimmed. We've been talking about it with her for awhile, casually suggesting that it would be easier to take care of if we just trimmed a bit off the ends. We might as well have suggested that she shave her head. In other words, the answer has always been a pretty vehement NO.
Until today. We made a trip to the SuperMall to exchange one of her birthday presents (her auntie and grandma think alike!) and I had a brainstorm, since there's a place just for kids to get their hair cut. Long story short, I asked Suzannah if she was up for a trim today, and then I talked about how great it would feel, and then I bribed her with a new toy. Hey, it worked for getting her to poop in the potty.
She frowned and said, "I don't wanna get my hair cut."
"Okay," I said. "That's fine if you're not ready. Maybe next time."
We walked on. A few moments passed, and suddenly she said, "Okay, okay. I'll get my hair cut."
And that's how we found ourselves inside this little kids' salon. It appealed to Suzannah right away because a.) there was a little corner filled with toys, books, and a play kitchen, b.) the "chairs" are more like rides -- Suzannah could choose between a car and an airplane, for instance; and c.) there are two strategically-placed televisions playing kids' videos. Suzannah wound up flying an airplane in front of Finding Nemo (how perfect) while her hair was trimmed and I looked on with a lump in my throat.
It's silly, but -- I kind of wasn't ready. I didn't expect her to say yes. I WASN'T READY FOR MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD TO LOSE HER LITTLE BABY CURLS THAT HAVE BEEN ON HER HEAD SINCE SHE CAME OUT OF ME. The stylist was undoubtedly used to this sort of thing; she reassured me that she'd keep Suzannah's natural wave and just take off enough to clean up the ends and make it a bit more manageable. And she saved some for me in a little bag, attached to a card that listed the date and which chair she sat in.
Suzannah was a pro. She didn't need any cheerleading from me; she was perfectly content to pretend to fly her little airplane and watch her video. She didn't seem to mind a perfect stranger combing her hair, much less snipping it off and adding a cute little braid when she was finished. (Do you think I was allowed to brush it this afternoon, though?)
She looked so grown-up to me as she sat there with her hair pinned up above the little cape, and at the same time, she was very much my little girl. My baby girl.
Sometimes she'll say something so simple like, "Okay, that makes sense," in a conversation (which is so cute coming from the mouth of a four-year-old), and suddenly I'm reeling because I understand that I am talking to a person who has her own opinions and can articulate them. Who can sigh with frustration and roll her eyes at me. Who holds a mirror up to my face every single day -- which is so, so profoundly humbling.
And sometimes I'll look at Isaac, who is such a different child, but when he laughs, I'll see the ways in which he and Suzannah share an unmistakable connection. There are moments when I see my little girl in the face of my baby boy, and that, too, is profound in ways I cannot yet describe.
I just want to keep and hold each moment of their lives. I never want to forget what it feels like to hold the weight of my sleeping child against my shoulder, or to hear the sound of their giggles. I never want to lose the memory of Suzannah's small, warm hand inside my own or the way Isaac sleeps against my chest. I want to remember the way I felt today when I watched my little girl's baby curls fall to the floor and the heartbreaking mix of love and pride and sadness because these perfect moments do pass, no matter how much I try to hold on.
It's sweet, mostly. A little bittersweet. There's something about the smell of these first summer days that has me remembering all the other summers of my life. Walking with my babies to the park, the sun on my bare arms this afternoon becomes the sun on my arms during finals week at the end of my freshman year of college as I walked to Dairy Queen with my friends and thought about packing up my first dorm room. The way my hair brushes against my neck reminds me of the afternoon I chopped off all my long hair (and in those days, it was blonde, like my daughter's) shortly before I graduated from high school. Some things are constant: the smells of grass and backyard barbecues, the sounds of lawn mowers and sprinklers and birds. The way the late-afternoon light filters through the trees at the park. It's the summer of 2010, but it's also, say, the summer of 2007, when Suzannah and I would take the same walk almost every single afternoon, shadows sliding across the sidewalk, the same scent of the evergreens in the air. We used to stop at Metropolitan Market, simply because it was cool and it was on our way home. We'd wander the aisles and sample cheese or fresh fruit before heading home to make dinner. Metro Market's closing this past winter makes me sad not so much because I'll miss their coffee or their deli (although I will), but because I'll miss the possibility of wandering through with my girl -- and, now, my boy -- on these summer afternoons.
Three years ago I wrote in Suzannah's journal, We exist purely in the moment: this July sun, this breeze, this beautiful life in which time becomes something both wispy and almost tangible, like a slice of peach. I wonder what I did with myself before I had you. I wonder why I didn't take enough notice of the moments in which I simply existed in a warm afternoon, or thought that it somehow wasn't enough.
I had a moment of melancholy this afternoon as we walked, the kind that almost always comes with nostalgia: a longing for those moments that have become perfect in my memory, knowing they can never exactly be repeated. I've been thinking a lot about last summer and being pregnant with Isaac, which was one of the sweetest times of my life. (Memory conveniently edits out the parts about feeling exhausted and overheated, or having to take Zofran in order to combat the "morning" sickness that never really ended.) I think, I'll never have that again, in exactly that way.
Of course, what I have now is just as sweet: a baby in my arms and his big sister's hand in mine. Quieter evenings have been replaced with chaos and noise that is joyful as often as it is frustrating. And I also know that someday, I will remember these days with deep longing too (and probably not far into the future, as I often feel deeply nostalgic for Isaac's newbornness just six short-yet-momentous months ago -- even though I wouldn't trade what I have now, the happy shrieks, the cuddles, the joyful baby my second child has become).
Next weekend, we'll load up the car and head out for our annual road trip. We're going early this year, and we're driving all the way to Minneapolis. We haven't driven that far in years, but I know it's going to flood me with the same feelings of nostalgia and deep longing that most of our road trips do, because we'll be tracing the routes that lead us both back to where we've lived most of our lives, both separately and together. There are memories on the road, and depending on where we're at I can slip so easily back into being twenty-one, or fifteen, or twelve.
Another reason I'm feeling more than a little nostalgic: Today, my little girl had her very first haircut. Yes, she made it all the way past her fourth birthday without having so much as a trim. But she was practically bald for the first two years of her life, so -- I just haven't been able to bring myself to get it cut until now. And I love her hair, her baby curls at the end, a wild golden mass trailing down her back.
It really was time. When it's wet, it nearly reaches her butt. It's hard to rinse in the tub. She'll hardly let me touch it with a brush, much less let me do things with it (although it should be noted that her daycare providers would send her home in cute little braids and things all the time). If we're doing an art project or something, she'll let me tie it back in a pony tail so she doesn't get paint or glue in it, but as soon as she's finished she'll yank it right out. (Funnily enough, when she was two and her hair was just beginning to grow, when she had just enough to pin back with little clips, she couldn't get enough of her hair bows. Grandma Griffith gave her a card with about a dozen colored hair bows, and for awhile she wouldn't go to bed at night until every single one of them was clipped in her hair. By the time she was a flower girl in her uncle's wedding, shortly before her third birthday, she allowed us to clip her hair back with a pretty bow to match her dress -- and it stayed in for about five minutes.)
But even though it's this wild mass of blonde tangles half the time, I really do love her hair. I love how it flows behind her when she runs, the way it sticks to her cheeks when she's sweaty or just waking up. I love the way she brushes it impatiently out of her face. (I don't particularly love the way she hollers, "OW, OW!" if I so much as hold a brush near her head, but whatever.)
I haven't wanted to push the trim, though. I don't really want her hair to be a source of power struggles, since we have enough of those. I wanted her to be involved in the decision to have it trimmed. We've been talking about it with her for awhile, casually suggesting that it would be easier to take care of if we just trimmed a bit off the ends. We might as well have suggested that she shave her head. In other words, the answer has always been a pretty vehement NO.
Until today. We made a trip to the SuperMall to exchange one of her birthday presents (her auntie and grandma think alike!) and I had a brainstorm, since there's a place just for kids to get their hair cut. Long story short, I asked Suzannah if she was up for a trim today, and then I talked about how great it would feel, and then I bribed her with a new toy. Hey, it worked for getting her to poop in the potty.
She frowned and said, "I don't wanna get my hair cut."
"Okay," I said. "That's fine if you're not ready. Maybe next time."
We walked on. A few moments passed, and suddenly she said, "Okay, okay. I'll get my hair cut."
And that's how we found ourselves inside this little kids' salon. It appealed to Suzannah right away because a.) there was a little corner filled with toys, books, and a play kitchen, b.) the "chairs" are more like rides -- Suzannah could choose between a car and an airplane, for instance; and c.) there are two strategically-placed televisions playing kids' videos. Suzannah wound up flying an airplane in front of Finding Nemo (how perfect) while her hair was trimmed and I looked on with a lump in my throat.
It's silly, but -- I kind of wasn't ready. I didn't expect her to say yes. I WASN'T READY FOR MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD TO LOSE HER LITTLE BABY CURLS THAT HAVE BEEN ON HER HEAD SINCE SHE CAME OUT OF ME. The stylist was undoubtedly used to this sort of thing; she reassured me that she'd keep Suzannah's natural wave and just take off enough to clean up the ends and make it a bit more manageable. And she saved some for me in a little bag, attached to a card that listed the date and which chair she sat in.
Suzannah was a pro. She didn't need any cheerleading from me; she was perfectly content to pretend to fly her little airplane and watch her video. She didn't seem to mind a perfect stranger combing her hair, much less snipping it off and adding a cute little braid when she was finished. (Do you think I was allowed to brush it this afternoon, though?)
She looked so grown-up to me as she sat there with her hair pinned up above the little cape, and at the same time, she was very much my little girl. My baby girl.
Sometimes she'll say something so simple like, "Okay, that makes sense," in a conversation (which is so cute coming from the mouth of a four-year-old), and suddenly I'm reeling because I understand that I am talking to a person who has her own opinions and can articulate them. Who can sigh with frustration and roll her eyes at me. Who holds a mirror up to my face every single day -- which is so, so profoundly humbling.
And sometimes I'll look at Isaac, who is such a different child, but when he laughs, I'll see the ways in which he and Suzannah share an unmistakable connection. There are moments when I see my little girl in the face of my baby boy, and that, too, is profound in ways I cannot yet describe.
I just want to keep and hold each moment of their lives. I never want to forget what it feels like to hold the weight of my sleeping child against my shoulder, or to hear the sound of their giggles. I never want to lose the memory of Suzannah's small, warm hand inside my own or the way Isaac sleeps against my chest. I want to remember the way I felt today when I watched my little girl's baby curls fall to the floor and the heartbreaking mix of love and pride and sadness because these perfect moments do pass, no matter how much I try to hold on.
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