...but I'm back now. It feels like time: the first real weekend I've had since school started. Has it only been two weeks? Was it only two weeks ago that we took the light rail to Seattle and the ferry to Bainbridge Island on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend? Was it only two weeks ago that we swam in Colman Pool at the edge of Puget Sound in West Seattle? That seems like another season already. We always say summer passes too quickly, but as a teacher, I'm always ready to go back to school, ready for the structure, for the natural rhythm of the seasons.
Our summer travels seem like they happened so long ago. Less than a week after we returned home from Minnesota, we drove to Montana to spend a few days in Bozeman and then headed for Glacier National Park. For the past several summers, this has been essential: I don't care what else we do as long as my heart can return to its roots and I can breathe the air south of Bozeman, or at a campsite in Apgar. These are the places that feed my soul and bring it home.
I wrote in my journal all summer, trying to capture the "hard kernels of memory" one of my best college professors spoke about on our May Seminar in Europe the summer I fell in love with Matt. I have a journal full of those. These are my hard kernels of memory from Montana:
5 p.m. Back at Zocalo, post swim. Kids with my mom, Matt at a brewery he wanted to check out. The sky darkened while we swam but only now decided to release spatters of rain. These sudden summer storms never show up in the weather forecast, it seems, but I love them. Thunder and lightning are muted in the Pacific Northwest--the thunder doesn't shake, lightning doesn't split the sky.The rest of the summer was exactly what I wanted: afternoons spent in my backyard while my kids rode bikes or played with the hose or the Slip 'n Slide. I read books on the patio and sipped iced tea. We slathered ourselves with sunscreen and spent hours at the splash park. We grilled salmon and sweet corn and ate outside. I've never craved travel during the summer months; unless we're driving to Montana, I want to stay exactly where we are. I love the way time slows down. I love the languid afternoons. I love noticing the way the water catches the light as the sprinkler rises over the lawn and my son kicks through the arc of water as he pumps his legs on our backyard swingset. My children whine about being bored and I say, "This is a privilege of childhood. Figure it out. No, you may not play on the iPad." They play board games until they're screaming at each other. They bike to the elementary school playground. They play in the water. (When I am cranky, it almost always works to put me in water.) My children grow tall and tan.
I bought Tin Man, Poems Across the Big Sky II, and Lowell Jaeger's latest collection: Earth-Blood and Starshine.
Now the rain pounds the streets. It's the sweetest music. The door to the coffee shop is open, the air steamy.
*
We visited my grandmother yesterday. She is significantly more frail than she was last time I saw her, but when she hugged me good-bye she gripped me tight. She had a plate of half-eaten pizza next to her chair and accepted one of my mother's cookies. Drank two cups of coffee. When one of her young caregivers stopped by to check on her she beamed, even though when he asked her how she was feeling she said, "Lousy, like always." But this is not a woman who will slip away this week, even though I know she has just wanted to go and be with Jesus since I don't know how long ago. Feels like half my life or more.
But I still don't think I'll see her again in this life.
"You'll always be my precious," she said into my ear -- she's said these words to me for my entire life. "I love you so much."
*
Leaving Bozeman is easier when we're heading to Glacier. Cold Smoke coffee on the way out of town. Lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza in Missoula, a stop at Rosauer's in Kalispell. Pulling into the park past 6:30. Run down to the lake. Breathe deeply. I miss the air as much as anything. Dinner at Eddie's: Huckleberry Reisling and trout almondine. Back to the KOA for the night -- tucked the kids into bunks and sat out under the porch light, drinking beer with my husband and reading A Gentleman in Moscow. Thursday: Up early to secure a campsite. I walked into Apgar while Matt set up camp, ordered a coffee and a hot water for the fancy instant oatmeal with turmeric and coconut. I scooped the steaming spoonfuls at a table just outside the Cedar Tree.
We made sandwiches at the campsite, skipped the long line for the shuttle to Logan Pass, and drove the Going-to-the-Sun road. Hot sun over snow on the trail to the Hidden Lake overlook -- Matt and Zannah went all the way, but Isaac and I turned back, slipping over the slush on the way down, sliding snowballs down the backs of each other's shirts, shrieking and laughing.
Spotted: moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats. No bears this time. (My dad found bear scat in their yard not long ago. I said, "I want to see a bear this trip." He said, "Well, then, slather yourself with honey and wait.")
Lake McDonald was colder this year after such massive snow-melt, but I swam anyway. Until I was too numb to keep swimming. Dinner at the campsite: hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, S'mores, Huckleberry Honey Ale. And then my sleeping pad deflated in the night. I don't know if that woke me or if my stomach did. I was violently sick in the camp bathroom, hoping I didn't wake anyone even as I could hear a man snoring raucously somewhere out in the darkness. I couldn't sleep after that, feeling every rock on the ground, but I felt better in the morning. I ate one of Matt's pancakes and sipped coffee, slowly. After hiking John's Lake Loop we played in the lake all afternoon, renting kayaks and a paddle board. I tried to nap in our tent after my night of fractured sleep, but the trapped afternoon heat turned it into a sauna. I found refuge in the lake instead, and slept much more peacefully the second night.
*
I went back to school early this year. When I discovered that my carpets had been shampooed the first week in August, I couldn't resist the urge to spend a sweaty afternoon setting up and cleaning several weeks before my students returned. I scrubbed desks and touched up walls I wasn't technically allowed to paint in the first place, but since our old, moldy school that's literally sinking into its foundations will be torn down and rebuilt in the next three years no one has bothered to scold me. And despite the mold, and the relentless ant problem, and the uneven sidewalks and the old carpets that never really get clean no matter how many times they're shampooed, I love my classroom so much. It's home, too. The kids spent hours with me there in August, as they do every year. They expect this; they are Teacher's Kids. They know their way around my high school in summer. They know the dark hallways and damp carpets. They see the chaos of registration when they hunker down in the corner of the cafeteria with their books and movies and games.
I do better when I can reclaim my space and spend some quiet hours planning there before the frenetic last week of August. Especially this year. My heart was thoroughly battered last June for reasons I can't even write about here, and on top of that the class of 2018 had the nerve to up and graduate and leave me after I taught them all for at least two years. I said to Carol, the IB Diploma Program coordinator/person who actually keeps our school running and who is essentially my mom at school, "I'm quitting this stupid job. I'm going to apply at COSTCO this summer. I need a job that I don't have to emotionally invest in. Teaching just ruins my life." I probably stomped my foot, too. She didn't even look up from what she was doing; she just flapped her hand at me and said, "You'd make a job at Costco emotionally demanding too, so you might as well just stay here."
So I'm back. And it's home.
*
My grandmother died the week before school started, early in the morning on a day I was helping to lead professional development for our school and our two feeder middle schools. I learned about it as I was getting ready to head out the door. I was expecting it; even so, I went back into the bathroom and cried quietly, so I didn't wake my sleeping family. Within the hour I was standing in front of a crowd of teachers with a microphone, trying to compartmentalize and, I think, mostly succeeding. I took a few breaks to walk around campus alone, blinking back tears. I couldn't even articulate what I was feeling. Families are complicated, and I have a lot of complicated feelings. But in the end, love transcends that.
My grandpa died ten years ago; four years before that, I heard his voice for the last time before his vocal chords were removed, the result of throat cancer. Your fingerprints are all over my life, I wrote to him. It occurs to me that this is true for my grandmother as well.
The parallels are eerie; my grandfather died over Labor Day weekend. My grandmother died almost exactly ten years later, within two days. Both times, I taught my first classes of the year for three days before hopping a late-night flight to Great Falls, in time to make a Saturday morning funeral. One week ago, I drove home from school, threw clothes into a suitcase, and went for a jog to clear my head. Soaked in a lavender-scented bath. Went out for dinner with my family. They dropped me off at the airport and somehow I'd checked my luggage and made it through security in ten minutes. I spent an hour sipping a glass of wine and reading a novel before boarding a late-night flight to Montana, where I slept for four hours in a hotel near the airport. In the morning, my brother and sister and nephew and mother piled into one car, and I drove with my dad through quiet morning on a road I've known since birth. We saw antelope in the fields along the Chester road. I wrote this when Suzannah was just over a year old, when we drove north to visit my grandparents:
There really is no sky like the Montana sky, even in other wide-open states. I can't explain it. The drive between Fort Benton and Chester is like breathing deeply for the first time -- your lungs expand and fill with air you didn't know you could hold.My grandmother was buried next to my grandfather. I'd last seen my grandfather alive in August that year, kissed his bruised arms and scrawled notes on the little pad he kept with him before driving west on highway 2 into the late summer heat. By the time I returned for his funeral a few weeks later, the weather had turned; clouds gathered over the Bears Paw mountains and rain spattered the roads. The sky at the gravesite last weekend was hazy, the air hot and slightly smoky. All of August, we've choked on smoke from wildfires as we continue to incinerate our planet.
"Wow," Matt kept saying. "This is just...huge." But it's really a struggle to find a word to attach to it. The evening sun lit the fields against the distant Highwood Mountains. We braked for pheasants, for a new spotted fawn. I lost track of time, my age, of what car I was even driving. I just kept breathing, clinging to the thought that at least some things never really change.
But when I stepped out of the car with my dad at the church in Gildford, the first thing I did was take a breath: I could still smell the scent of harvest on the hi-line. And that smell, woven into my very DNA, is home.
And now I'm back in Washington, doing what I do, taking my kids to school and Tae Kwon Do and soccer. Zannah is in jazz band. She's almost as tall as I am. The kids compete in their first Tae Kwon Do tournament next month. Life rolls on. My 2018 seniors visit; I get to have lunch with them, or they burst into my classroom before they head to college. And my heart bursts in some way basically all day long, every day. This is life. This is the life I am senselessly privileged to have.
Tonight I'm home with my family. We let the kids stay up too late on Fridays, but Friday is Family Movie Night on normal school weeks. We put on pajamas as soon as we can, and we eat fun things (either takeout or whatever looks good and easy at Trader Joe's), and we watch something, who even cares what, and everyone is silly, and we fall asleep knowing that tomorrow we have a soccer game but we do not have to set an alarm, and we'll have time to make pancakes and Matt and I will sip extra cups of coffee, hoping to read on the couch but knowing the kids will fill up the house with their noise.
Here's a thing I think I am sort of good at, at this point in my life: noticing and appreciating moments that fill me with peace, even if they are not peaceful moments. Like the sound of my kids practicing their Tae Kwon Do on an ordinary afternoon. Like my daughter's trumpet practice, or the sight of my son reading in his room, the way he still tucks his feet under his bum while he hunches over his book. Like the view of the mountains in Montana, the familiar dip in a road I haven't traveled in years. The way the landscape changes as I see it from the airplane, even though I am an anxious flyer: from the sheared golden stubble in the square fields that give way to wilder landscapes, the rivers that wind through the prairies and then the mountains. Last weekend I was somehow bumped into first class for the short flight between Great Falls and Seattle, and I sipped wine from a real glass and started a new book. I looked out the window at the landscape of my life, at the prairie, the rivers, the mountains. And I could breathe.
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