Stillness

The fog settles heavily over our neighborhood in the mornings now, and at night. Twice this week I had to leave for school hours earlier than my usual part-time schedule allows, and my headlights could barely part the fog in the darkness. On Saturday mornings like this, I notice the silence and the stillness, even as day breaks. Our backyard is shrouded in mist. The air is dense, damp, cold. Sometimes the sun breaks through later and everything, everything is golden -- but for the last few days, the sky has remained heavily overcast.

And it’s beautiful. All of it. Yesterday Suzannah and I donned hoodies and took a nature walk after school, wandering up the street and through the lovely wooded park between our home and her elementary school. She pointed out the deep purple leaves of the trees lining the street and the red and yellow leaves falling from the trees in the park, shaken loose by squirrels in the branches and drifting to the ground before our eyes. We crunched through piles of those leaves, ran our cold fingers over mossy tree trunks, and breathed in the damp earthy smell of fall, the sweetness of slightly rotting leaves and the hint of woodsmoke on the evening air.

The other morning one of my favorite baristas at my regular drive-thru said, “Doesn’t the transition from summer to fall just feel so crazy busy?” And I thought, yes. Yes. It’s not just the transition back to school, although I suppose that’s part of it; it’s somehow just that our evenings and weekends fill so quickly. And mostly with good things, fun things, time spent with friends and family, but things. It’s also the season of Open Houses at school (mine and Suzannah’s), conferences, weekday evening gymnastics when we need to miss a Saturday class, weekday evening Family Literacy Nights or Math Nights, and so much pizza. Trips to the pumpkin patch. Halloween parties. And already we find ourselves caught up in this forward churning momentum towards November.

Years ago I remember scrawling in a notebook something along the lines of, It’s a good thing this is my favorite time of year or I’d be feeling more crazy than I already am. I didn’t have kids yet, but I was working on my Master’s degree and my professional certificate and teaching my first IB classes, so it’s safe to say I felt overwhelmed most of the time. These days, the rhythm of my life is entirely different -- no less full, but different -- and yet I find myself noticing and appreciating the same things: the heavy morning fog, the scent of woodsmoke, the way the colors stand out against the gray skies. I love the contrast between the cozy indoors and the chill of the outdoors, all the romance of fall, but maybe I also love the way the quiet foggy mornings create a space for stillness in my life. In my heart.

And now that I do have children, those spaces are as necessary as air, because otherwise it would be too easy not to notice the ordinary moments that make up this forward churning motion. Really, it’s the ordinary moments that knock my socks right off -- like, for instance, last weekend’s trip to the pumpkin patch with friends, which is something everyone in the world does in October. We met up with another family whose children went to daycare with ours, and the kids still love each other. We took a lot of pictures of them running around together, holding hands. Our firstborn daughters, their younger daughter and our son.

Things the kids loved: The “corn room” (literally a barn floor filled with a ton of corn kernels. Like a hay pit. Only with corn), the kids’ play area with a “cow train” and playground and mini bouncy house, the mineshaft tube slide, the hay ride, the giant jumping pillow, the tractor “rides” that were really pedal carts, the corn maze, the mechanical bull, the lukewarm hot chocolate.

(...Oh, hey, I rode a mechanical bull! Twice. I’ve secretly always wanted to do it.)

But the best part of the day, for me, was watching the two older girls tackle the the zip line together, harnesses and helmets and all. They weren’t the slightest bit nervous but were instead all fierce determined energy. Afterwards, they took off their helmets and shook out their hair and grinned their beautiful confident grins, and I thought, damn. My girl is a force in ways I definitely was not as a seven-year-old.

Sometimes I wonder why I write here, in this space that began as a place to share anecdotes about my toddler with her grandparents, the only people I assumed would be interested. I suppose we really do live a terribly ordinary life, in our little house in the suburbs. Our two kids, our dog, our jobs. I write about things like playing “Who gets to stay home today?” when one of our children spikes a fever or can’t hold down cough medicine, or what it’s like to apologize to my kindergartener when I’ve lost my shit. I write about the sheer elation in our household when a child masters pooping in the potty even though this is fundamentally uninteresting to anyone who doesn’t actually live here. Sometimes I write about feeling lonely, or struggling with labels -- part-time teacher, or part-time mother, or part-time everything. And sometimes, when I’m in a funk, I think who cares about any of this?

And maybe no one. But when I’m a little more clear-headed, I also know this: ordinary stories of ordinary lives resonate with me. Those small still moments, those spaces in which we notice the tiny bits that might easily be overlooked. Their lightness and their weight. The way two little girls shake out their hair after a ride on a zip line. A three-year-old’s sloppy and slightly aggressive but totally affectionate kisses. The way my children might decide, at 7:50 on a weekday morning, that they are baby penguins, and so while I am cleaning up the breakfast dishes and trying to make sure my daughter’s lunch is in her backpack and my son has his show-and-tell for the day I must also become Mama Penguin.

It’s the small stories I want to read, and it’s the small stories I can write. These are the moments that really connect us. At some level, I must really believe that, because here I am. Still.