the last of the milk

there is less than half of a half gallon of almond milk in my fridge right now, just enough milk to get us through breakfast. this is my great triumph this week. when planning through life's transitions, it s a delicate balance to make the milk last right up until the last minute without running out too early or needing to buy more too soon. I have succeeded.

and it's not just the milk victory that deserves to be celebrated this morning. there's the glorious sunrise that greeted me on our last morning here. there's penelope sitting in the driveway more than halfway packed. there's a boy on the couch reading to himself. there is a reunion with maeve and then a reunion with eric to look forward to this afternoon. but mostly just making it to today has me cheering the loudest.

we leave shelter island today. we're about two weeks ahead of our planned departure date, and of course I have a lot of different feeling about that. leaving now means not seeing people I have put off visiting al summer because time would be so much looser in our last two weeks. it means walking away from the planning for next summer, one of the things I love very best. it means leaving after a week of parenting on my own which leaves little space for leisurely sunsets and moments of reflection and contemplation. it means a slightly frazzled version of a packed car, one I am sure eric will undo and try to remedy in a parking lot somewhere this evening.  but here we are, and here we go, and that is that.

end of camp can be my favorite. I like the process of looking back and looking forward, making sense of what worked and what didn't, cleaning out the dregs of summer supplies and lost and found. because it was just me with kids this week after the rest of the staff left, mostly it meant kid-friendly activities during the day and then lots of late night conversations with phil. I am not good at late nights. I would do everything I could think of to wear those kids out during the day. they are both official bike riders now (all this flat, paved space did the trick), but we only have one functional bike between them, so two of us would chase the one on the bike through camp while the one on foot would whine about it being their turn already. I played soccer with them. like actual run up and down the field and kick the ball soccer. maybe this is normal behavior for other parents, but if you've known me longer than about thirty seconds you know that things that require coordination while running aren't really my strong suit. 

and we started school this week, too. it is good. it just fits and makes sense and kids dig it and thank goodness for all those things. 

and then the packing. eric does the packing in our household and he takes great pride in this role. doing it on my own this week, fitting our life for the past three months in to our little honda fit while making sure to leave room for five passengers is not easy. did I mention the camping gear that has to fit on top or the lego creations that are oh-so-fragile or the shells and sea glass and who knows what else qualifies as treasure in cora's mind? everything I would pack, the kids would immediately need so we would unpack it and start over. everything I sorted into the give away pile was immediately discovered and reclaimed. but we are leaving anyway, and we'll figure it out as we go. isn't that the way the best adventures happen? isn't that just what we've always done?

my last moon flower bloomed this week. eric planted moonflower seeds back in march on the back deck of mudlfower and packed the seedlings for the trip up here (see what I mean? packing master.) and transplanted them here to vine around the deck. it is his love language. moonflowers reach all the way back to the beginning of our relationship, one of the first things he ever planted for me. I remember I smelled it before I even saw it that summer, and he has planted them just for me ever since. he saves the seeds every year. this year the beach soil was too sandy and the deck too sunny, so I only got four flowers through the summer, but I noticed the leaves instead: big heart-shaped reminders of where our roots should be.

so here we go. there are adventures to be had and hugs to be given and reflecting to do and soul cleansing to accomplish. but first, we're going to finish off the last of that milk.

the ripples of us

i.  the kids and I take long walks through camp and up and down the beach. on good days i remember to bring bags and we pick up trash the whole way. jamin loves to pick up trash. cora loves to pick up rocks. it is always an adventure to see what we find. sea glass counts as treasure, but freshly broken glass is a hazard. time changes everything. the weirdest thing we find consistently is those little individual flossers. so many of them. why? I have no metaphor for discarded flossers on the beach.

ii. we drove eric to the airport today. he is somewhere in the air between philadelphia and orlando right now. his grandfather is dying. we started the summer with eric's grandfather in the hospital, then things improved, but now it is hospice and the end is close. it feels sad. it feels complicated. it feels lonely and inconvenient to be so far away. I am in new york and eric is in florida and somehow no one is where we belong but everyone is right where they should be. because how can we be anywhere else than exactly where we are supposed to be? at least that is what I keep telling myself in between deep, shoulder-scrunching breaths: "I am exactly where I need to be."

iii. rabbit and kitra visited. we did fun things and showed off island life, but mostly we just reminded ourselves why we all like each other so much. I need reminders of what my life looks like at all these different angles. I need to see my life through someone else's view, too, and rabbit is so good for that. she loves us, all of us, and she sees us all so differently than the way I see us. and she brought sc peaches and grits and we had biscuits twice while she was here. definitely a good visit.

iv. we keep making plans that just keep getting jumbled, but that is when the best things happen, right? I think we are going to travel. eric bough a roundtrip ticket, so eventually he will come back to new york. then we will go see some things before we go home. it seems silly not to poke around new england since we are right here. and once we are home, we're just...home. I need to camp. I need to explore places I don't know well. I need big trees and beaches where the view is ocean, not bay. I need to feel small and clean and capable and wild. I need to relearn myself. I need space from summer so I can decide how I feel about it. or not. maybe I already have everything I need.

v. we can see the stars better here than we can at home. I do not understand how this is possible. it seems like on the mountain so far from town our light pollution should be far less than here on shelter island. we see a shooting star almost every night. we made sure rabbit saw one while she was here. I think we all just wished for home, in all the ways we know it. one night after watching for stars on the deck eric and I slipped down to the waterfront to swim in the dark with the last of the staff. we all left glowing trails in the water as we swam through the bioluminescence. we made our own shooting stars. plenty of wishes for all.

the direction we are facing

I know my call despite my faults
And despite my growing fears

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

'Cause I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

~mumford and sons

and so here it is, the end of summer,
the end of a hard summer,
hard in ways i didn't expect and wasn't prepared for.
I can know that endings are really just beginnings and that
the two are always so tangled up
it is hard to tell the difference really,
but there are big parts of me that want
to separate the two, that want
to know this is what is over and this
is what is starting.
there is so much in me
that wants to look backwards,
that wants to say
I see where I made mistakes,
I see where I failed,
I see where I fell short
and where I just never even really tried.
and I want to say sorry
and I want to explain myself
and I want the chance to make it right.
but because this is not just an ending
but a beginning, too,
there is even more looking ahead,
seeing what needs to happen right now,
what ways I need to forge onward,
to leave other people's perceptions to other people to figure out,
not to fix it all,
not to tie it up in a package with a bow
to store under my bed in a shoebox labeled quinipet 2015,
but instead to take that messiness,
the places I didn't do my best or didn't do at all,
to take the relationships
that left me feeling yucky and burned,
to take the criticisms, the hard conversations,
the conversations that never happened at all,
to take all of that
and all the good that came this summer too,
to take it all and use it as the lens through which I look ahead.
to take who I was
and who I am and
keep becoming who I am meant to be.
to keep hearing the call that only gets louder,
even when other people keep trying to drown it out.
even when I, in my insistence otherwise, in my glaring mistakes,
try to drown it out.
the call is clear.
the call is for home and community and intimacy.
the call is to keep creating even though none of it comes easy.
the call is to live big and love bigger and bigger and bigger,
big enough to forgive myself,
big enough to keep trying anyway,
big enough to let go,
big enough to say yes.
there is beauty to be found
even in the mixed up tangle of a beginning
and an end. because what is the difference, really?
only the direction we are facing.