LIFE WITH KIDDOS

Beginning, and ending.

I walked outside this morning and felt it immediately–the cool calm that let me know that there, lurking on the outer fringes of August, was the end of summer, its dry air and cool mornings lying in wait, sure to rush in soon to fill the void of something not quite laziness, something that best describes what the people here do when the atmosphere is thick and wet, when breathing or walking require commitment, when activity is measured by this fact, and in general we tend to do less. Summer is ending.

I had a sense it was about to happen. This weekend we hosted a handful of friends here in town for supper, coolers full of beer and food mounded in foil pans. By the end, when it was too late to play cornhole anymore and the group was small enough to sit around the table on the deck, we talked into the night, each of us present in the moment that is friendship. Somewhere the Avett Brothers drifted down from a pair of outdoor speakers, and it occurred to me that I’ve heard a million Avett Brothers songs, but I don’t think I’ve heard any of them twice, and nearly all of them have been performed live. I wondered how they remembered all the lyrics. We talked of the rain that was supposed to show up and ruin our cookout and of how lucky we’d been.

And then yesterday, Saturday, we didn’t do much but we did everything together, Kelly and Julia and me. We played together in the floor, Kelly sitting at the desk looking over something on the computer, me cross-legged in the floor, Julia wandering back and forth from the den and back into the office, a toy in her growing hands, her bare feet tracing some invisible circuit out to the couch and around. 

Or we switched, and I’d sit in on one of the purple chairs, my feet on the ottoman, something aimless on the television, Kelly on the faded green rug, her legs drawn up to her stomach. We kept one eye on Julia and another toward the future, which was growing in her belly even then.

Later, we stopped by the grocery store for more avocados. We’d eaten all of the guacamole the night before, and my father and stepmother were coming over to help us eat the leftovers, and we needed to make more. In the store, Julia sat in a shopping cart designed to look like a police car. She steered the tiny plastic steering wheel, her lips buzzing as she dashed down the slalom of the produce section, squealing around the corner toward the meat counter, the grocery cart struggling to keep its purchase on the waxed floor. 

On the way out to the minivan, we were pelted with the grape-sized raindrops that had somehow gracefully managed to not show up to Friday’s cookout. We rushed home to let the dog in before she became soaked. Julia stared up at the sky, amused by it all.

This has been Julia’s summer. Well, Julia’s and Kelly’s. Every day an adventure, every day a field trip, an excursion into the Piedmont to swim or bike or pet exotic animals, every day a chance to roll out the universe a little wider for our daughter. Kel has been fantastic. 

What a summer! Julia learned to walk and say “Da-da” with the sweetest hush. We learned she was to be a big sister. We sold Kel’s old faithful of a car and bought the van, and then we decided to sell the house as well. Life is moving, moving, and normally summers aren’t the time for that. It’s tough for life to move so much in such humidity. 

But then this morning, I knew why we were going to be okay. There, in the heart of the matter, I realized we’d made it through this season of momentum, that the horizon had never looked so bright. Glory in the highest / I will shout and sing, and I actually sang these words this morning in the dining room. 

I remember when I was a boy and we were playing at a friend’s farm and we were back deep in the woods. There was a stream, something that looked to have been there for years for how far it had eroded the banks, sloped sharply down, their sides terribly steep until they flattened into a sandy shoal on either side of the water. 

We went down, one by one, to the creek, and I remember pausing at the top, at the edge, trying with all my single-digit aged might to conceive how to best accomplish this task before me, and eventually I resolved that rationality in this instance should be ignored. To get to the bottom required a small step forward, required the mind giving permission to the body to begin falling, and from there, it was a matter of half-jogging, half stumbling. This was an experiment in trust and the understanding that stopping would not be an option until we reached the end.

Going up is deceitfully easy. Coming down is much harder. Yet coming down rarely requires the grace and practice that going up requires. 

The end of summer is upon us. It won’t be long. And most beautiful of all is the feeling of falling, all of us together, Kelly and Julia Elizabeth and Thomas Alan and me, all of us, yes all of us, rushing forward to the water, the cool air of fall chasing us, the delight of our season of life running tight against the grain of the autumn, the promise of light carrying our feet forward, quick as lightning, just like Julia, her eyes full of vigor as she tramples out of one room and into another, her voice quick as she calls us to look, look, look!