present: tense

our life carries a strange tension right now. it isn't tension like that unbearable feeling when something needs to be said and no one is willing to say it. it is more like the tension required to fly a kite: no slack allowed. we are pulling against this balance of being excited about our summer plans, living our life here, and preparing to leave that life for four months in just three weeks. there is so much to do just in normal springtime life, but now there is also summer to plan for. and how do you plan to leave your life just when the living is getting good? we come out of winter and melt into spring and then whisk ourselves away just as brevard is waking up.

there is so much I will miss this summer. I am not even allowing myself to think about the people we will miss because that is too much to bear. but I will miss the tailgate market, afternoons at eagle lake, the way the forest smells in august, afternoon rainstorms that don't even phase us anymore, bumping into someone anywhere we go, our garden, the tunnel that our neighborhood driveway becomes as the leaves fill in on the trees, duckpond at dusk, evenings at oskar blues, the fourth of july festival, the kids' summer reading program at the library, swimming holes.


but for everything that we will miss here, there is something waiting on shelter island: shell beach, goooood pizza, running and biking on flat land, sylvester manor, contra dances, mashomack, good bagels, sunsets at the pridwin, the deck at greg's house, kayaking, montauk, no traffic lights, beach walks after supper, sea glass, singing all day, conversations that matter.




























and in between all the pre-emptive missing and longing, there is the list of things to get done. all the "one last times" that have to tide us over until october. it feels so busy when I look at the calendar blocks full on every day (get oil change, buy chicken feed, eat at dolly's, acorn class campout) but I find us all lying in the grass together in the middle of the afternoon or reading library books in the hammock for long stretches, lingering longer than anyone who has 20 days to reduce her life to what will fit in her car should feel free to linger.

but the lingering is the most necessary part. I need to sit and watch my children stand fully clothed in the lake and try to catch fish with a heel of bread and a net. I need to lay on the deck with my eyes closed and guess which birds I can hear. we moved a old futon out on the porch and we all but live out there now (this is rural north carolina and indoor furniture outdoors is totally acceptable, by the way). I need to watch the chickens do their chicken thing. I need long walks to nowhere in my neighborhood. I need still in a way I never have before.
























it will all get done, every bit of it. it always does. we won't forget anything we can't live without. we'll learn we can live without a lot more than we thought. and then we will come home and we will be different and here will be different and there will be just enough the same to carry us through. it won't take anytime at all before I am planning our next adventure, forgetting the odd tension that leaving brings. the kind of tension it takes to fly a kite. the kind of tension that requires a string to keep pulling us back home.