Chronicles of Chaos
End of Summer
I pull into the driveway at eight o’clock. The sky’s still light, our neighbors are eating dinner at the picnic table in their yard. I park the car, open the garage and carry a few bags into the house. When I return for the rest, Bernard’s best dog friend is half inside the car looking for him. Only her hind legs stick out below the car door.
She pops out of the car and stares at me. Quinn-y, I say, Bernard’s gone back home. It’s just me here for the weekend. She eyes me suspiciously, then trots away. I finish unpacking the car.
I’m not thinking anything in particular until I set down the last bag on the kitchen counter. I’m suddenly flooded with memories–the boys building Legos next to the couch, Amelia reading Box Car Children in her favorite fuzzy chair, Oliver floating his boat sticks down the river, Bernard and Quinn racing around the grass while the kids ride their bikes down the street. The scenes are right in front of me, in spectacular color as if I could touch them. And yet they can never happen again.
Ten days ago we left our summer in this place and went back home. I’m here alone for the writers’ conference, three days of rest and inspiration. It’s been ten minutes and I don’t think I can take it. My heart hurts. The house envelopes me in its loneliness. I want to reach out and grab those memories in a bubble, bring everyone back so we can breathe them again.
I call Michael and tell him he’s right, we should have stayed longer, I regret my decision that the kids needed a few weeks settling back home before school starts. I wish we’d stretched every minute. He listens to me cry for awhile, reminds me why this weekend on my own is a good idea and agrees, yeah, it was a great summer.
The days didn’t feel so special as we lived them. The boys shared a room and spent two months in general fatigue. Amelia complained about missing her school friends. We didn’t go on a fabulous river trip or even camping. Mostly I cobbled some activity together, convincing the kids to put on their sunscreen with promises of picking up their favorite coffee cake in town on our way to the river. Oliver spent more than a few days in his pj’s till after dinner, when he changed into clean ones. We played in the sandbox in the front yard for hours and hours. The last weeks, going to the river started to feel too routine.
At the conference, one of the writers talks about memoirs. She describes memoir as a creative act of shaping memory, or imposing a shape on life through memory. This weekend has shown me the outlines of our summer, without the change of place and my time apart I’m not sure I would see it so clearly. After awhile, the feeling of loss passes and I carry summer with me like a chapter in a book I can turn to whenever I want. And in the present, I’m more awake. All those repetitive, seemingly unremarkable activities with the kids have a new dimension.
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