The other day I was clearing the table for dinner, moving the odds and ends that accumulate throughout the afternoon: a chunky eraser, a pencil, a slinky, a small tub of Play-Doh, and my son's weekly reading log. I paused over that, just letting my eyes linger on his careful, blocky sentences. He enjoys reading well enough, but he sighs over writing about it. Still, he is ever the teacher's son. He sharpens his pencil over the kitchen trash can, and now, a few weeks into the school year, he settles in to read and write immediately after we get home in the afternoons so the rest of the day is his. He turns to the sandbox while the afternoons are still dry and warm, to the backyard, or to his toys. Daily he spreads his toys across the floor, building his own creations: towers, robots. And I stand at the kitchen table, gazing at his writing: the shape of his letters. The heavy black oval of a period at the end of a sentence. He kneels on the chair while his writes, his feet crossed underneath his bum. He's already shed his grungy little socks; they are balled up on the floor in the family room.
I think about the way I'll slip this reading log into his school box later, the special case I keep for his papers. I'm unsentimental about so many material things. I feel no nostalgia for old Happy Meal toys, for slick paperback picture books collected from so many book orders, for spit-up stained onesies. I have no desire to fill up the corners of my closets with things I'll never look at or use, just to take up space, just to have them. I save stories. But I also do save some things. Not everything. Not every piece of paper my children scribble on. Not every math worksheet. But they each have a box or two, one that does fit unobtrusively into a closet, filled with exactly these treasures: these carefully printed sentences, with their mix of capital and lower-case letters. The heavily scribbled dots above the i's, at the end of the sentences. The sheer beauty of the work, the earnest care. Someday I imagine myself as a mother of two grown children: sliding one of these papers out of the box, and letting myself return to this moment. These golden September afternoons. The whining, the sighing, the resigned sharpening of the pencil, the triumph of completion. The shhhh of the sliding door as it opens for my son's escape to the backyard. The crumpled little socks. The blocky dinosaur eraser, blackened with pencil lead around the edges. All of it.
*
Last night we attended our daughter's Open House. It was a week of Open Houses; three of us are in three different schools. High school, middle school, elementary school. This requires a certain amount of juggling, adjusting to our new normal, but the Winslow girls are efficient, and our mornings have taken on a different sort of smoothness. I wake up earlier without snoozing my alarm, even when I crave more sleep, simply because right now I need the space to be a little quiet with my coffee in the midst of all the movement: Suzannah hurrying her dad to the car, Matt adjusting to leaving the house earlier so he can drop her off on the way to the bus stop. I take Isaac to school a little later, and there's something painfully sweet about this too: this school is his now. I reach into the backseat and squeeze his hand before he jumps out of the car, running towards the open doors, his backpack bouncing over his little butt, his jeans barely staying above the waistband of his superhero underpants. He barely looks back. And we're okay. This is my seventh year dropping off a child at these doors, and I trust the adults on the other side to love him well for a few hours. His cheerful running and his careless goodbye tell me that I'm right.
The night before my little girl started middle school, I didn't sleep. At all. I went to bed early and tossed and turned. Matt came to bed, and I tried to relax into the normalcy of hearing him breathe next to me, but I stared at the ceiling, stared at the wall, tried very deliberately not to stare at the clock, and then gave up. I grabbed a book and retreated to the couch so my restlessness wouldn't bother Matt, and I read for I don't know how long. I dozed a bit before sunrise and rose feeling wrecked and queasy. Let her be okay. I prayed this with every breath. Let them be kind.
My own first day of school was a blur, not unlike my first day of school after I dropped my girl off at kindergarten. But she greeted me with an easy smile that afternoon, her face flushed in the heat.
"Great!" she said, when I asked, So how was your first day of middle school? I slept much better that night.
She comes home smiling every day. She loves her teachers. She and her friends chatter their way home. She and her gym locker partners couldn't figure out how to work their combination lock, so their exasperated PE teacher told them to watch a YouTube video for homework; the next day, my daughter was an expert who announced that she "saved the day." In the meantime, she reported, the eighth graders who helped her were "super nice" about it, and I sent up another prayer of thanks.
The sight of my daughter walking across the playground to meet her brother at his classroom door, swinging her trumpet case, fills my heart to bursting. So did the sight of her at Open House last night. After hot dogs and chips in the cafeteria, we followed her through her schedule.
"This way, I know a shortcut," she called over her shoulder as we hurried to keep up with her. Band to math. Math to science. Science to P.E. She glanced back, just briefly, her ponytail swinging. I wanted to talk to all of her teachers, wanted more than the few minutes we were allotted. I wanted to tell them my daughter loves them, loves learning, and feels safe and happy there, and that is everything to me. That's all I want. I need those teachers to know how much that matters. Having a child in school has shaped everything I am as a teacher of other people's children.
*
It's soccer season again, and I've fallen back in love with it all. Practice falls in the hour before dinner. Last month I jogged around the track while the girls practiced on the field, and my son ran off with the other younger brothers to brandish sticks and fling pine cones at each other. Lately, though, I settle into my camp chair under the trees at the edge of the field, and I try to read, my eyes bouncing between the girls on the field and my son playing nearby in the dirt.
The sun is lower in the sky each day. The afternoons have been mostly warm, sunny, and dry. The sun hits the leaves above me, and the late afternoon is framed in golden light. And every day, exactly fifteen minutes before the end of practice, a large flock of Canada Geese assemble in the middle of the field encircled by the dusty track, just beyond the soccer players. They waddle into position and wait until each goose is present and accounted for. At first I don't notice, but then suddenly there are these fat, feathered bodies, shifting and shuffling.
And then, each day, at exactly the same time, they take to the air. They lift off the field in a grand fluttering of wings, and they fly over my head, honking low and loud. I lift my eyes and watch their bellies sail over the tips of the trees, watch them fall into their perfect V.
It is spectacularly beautiful.
*
Last year, I was so ready to be done with September: I was too busy, and too sick. I coughed and sniffled my way through the month, trying to juggle too many meetings -- if I look in my planner from last year, one week shows seven meetings in five days, which is just stupid for a part-time employee. I was still on church council. I was unmoored and stressed and exhausted.
This year is different. September has seemed long this year, too, but at the same time, it's been awfully sweet. I'm still breathing. My girl comes home smiling. My son bursts through his classroom door with a grin at the end of the day. My students are wonderful and ridiculous and I love them. The dynamics in my department feel so healthy right now, and even when I'm stressed, I know I'm in good company with a good team, and I am grateful. I love the work. I love the people. That's a lot.
I was more than ready to be back at school by the middle of August this year; I was just done with this summer, which had become stressful in its constant demands, pulling me away from home when I really just wanted to be still and present and rooted. It's a privileged problem to have, and I don't regret the travel, not exactly, it's just that I really wanted to let more of the days be slow. The days are anything but slow now, but they are ours, they are here. We are learning how to settle into our groove, and I'm so deeply happy in all of it. My classroom space. My cozy little house. Our routines: these mornings in which I make time to curl up in the living room with my coffee. These afternoons, in which I wrap my arms around my sweaty, smiling children. Soccer practice, the geese, the setting sun. Everything is settling into place, into a rhythm, and it's the rhythm of our lives, every fall. Today I'm a little wistful about September's end, but on Sunday, the first day of October, as the temperature drops just a bit, I plan to pick up pho on the way home from church and curl up on the couch with a quilt in the afternoon. I'll drift to sleep in the living room as the shadows lengthen across our driveway, and later I'll sit at the dining room table and grade commentaries.
The big picture is often unbearable and I don't know how to move through the world these days. Doesn't mean I'll stop trying. Doesn't mean I'll stop speaking. But when I stop and breathe inside the right now of my life, how can I feel anything but gratitude?
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