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.