saying goodbye to summer

Last Sunday may have been my last dip in the ocean for this year. Sass and I spent the weekend at Camp Three Old Chicks, Sarah's beach house. If summer must end, this was the perfect way to say goodbye . Ocean swimming at noon and 5 p.m., a run or walk as early as we could manage it (meaning as early as I could manage to drag myself out of bed. S and S are inevitably up before me.) Plenty of wine and mah jongg and talking, on subjects ranging from work, family, how can we save the world, the causes of the Civil War, and can a gift ever be insulting? I drove home from South Lyme completely relaxed and renewed.

Our family week in Nantucket was also very relaxing--as relaxing as any vacation involving two adults, two teenagers, and two little kids could be--meaning, semi-relaxing. Pierre and I went to a wonderful restaurant, the Pearl, to celebrate our anniversary, and the rest of the time was spent biking, touring, sand-castle-building, and separating Libby and Lulu when things got too intense. The house we rented was much bigger than our regular house, a veritable beach palace! The people we rented it from were great--teachers on the island--really interesting people I hope we meet again. We had a very interesting conversation about the possiblility of doing a high school production of a P.G. Wodehouse play, with the genders reversed!

Besides being my honeymoon spot, Nantucket is also the place I happened to be when my mom died, and today is the anniversary of her death. This vacation was the first time I had been back to Nantucket since that day, so I had some bittersweet memories, but also happy thoughts of my mom, and a good feeling of closeness to her.

Ironically, given the subject of my previous post, my mom was always concerned with not appearing eccentric, although she called it other things, like "weird", "abnormal", "not like everyone else"--but I adored her for the very things that made her so unlike any other mothers I knew. She was an older mother, over forty when I was born, and she cried when people mistook me for her granddaughter--but I never thought of her as old at all. She was a working mother, when it wasn't common, and I was so proud of her work, as a special education teacher.
I loved that she was fearless, driving my brother and me across the country on "educational" trips, which included trying to find the Watts riots (thankfully she never located them), and driving into the private grounds of the White House (we were escorted out by the Secret Service). She was dramatic, funny, and made my childhood into a sort of miracle play, or Irish opera, maybe a soap opera sometimes. I miss her, and am proud to carry on her tradition of motherly eccentricity!

Here's a poem I read today that reminds me of the end of summer--the wistfulness and the exhilaration of the changing seasons, and passages of life.

Poem: "Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond" by Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press.
Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond

As for life
I'm humbled,
I'm without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen--
a tree angel, perhaps,
of a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
To be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort--
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/265