Settled

Well, not so much settled as settling. Here’s a funny story: Two weeks ago I wrote a post about what I have learned from the madness of this summer and then I read it over and it was just kind of gloomy. I wrapped it up by saying something along the lines of, we’ll get the moving truck this weekend and I will presumably be packing much more than just boxes and furniture into it, it looks like it’s carrying our future around too. Not a bad thought, but I didn’t publish the post because it felt incomplete and I just didn’t know if I could handle any more of my own drivel. 

Boy am I glad that I waited. I woke up the following Monday morning and couldn’t believe how amazing the sleep that I had just left was. I walked to the door and opened it for Louie to go out and left it open to absorb some of the quiet morning that was humming along in our back yard. I padded around the house looking at every window and taking in the way that our things look so different when they have new light easing over them. In a word, everything felt possible.

Our back yard in the morning fog

Pinterest gave this to me:

And it’s just so simple and true. I suspect that I am going to think a lot about this summer in the coming years because life handed us a lot and we just kind of pushed through. There are a couple of things that I know with enough certainty to say that they hold consistently true, and the first is that time happens. The days, no matter how ferocious they may seem, just keep coming and coming and coming. There is a certain sea-glass feel to the edges of sharp memories the further we get away from the point of contact, and in that way, it’s very true that time serves as its own balm.

The second thing that I feel that I know is that it’s always possible to make peace. Currently I’m making peace with some things I wouldn’t have asked for but can’t change. I have to sit down with it, wait for the mornings to keep coming, and at some point decide how I would like to proceed with these memories. When I look back at this summer, I hope that what I think about the most is not what I feel that we lost, but the lesson that I learned in making peace and finding joy. It’s such simple rhetoric, but hard business.

Asher’s first double rainbow. He kept shouting to everyone coming out of the grocery store to “WOOK UP! A WAINBOW!” And then they all looked and told him thank you. The trumpeter of beauty.

I’m turning 30 in August which is actually something that I’ve really been looking forward to. I feel really grateful (honored?) to be putting one foot in front of another and I love all that my 20s were to me. I don’t need more of that, I want what’s coming. I think part of it is that I have been surrounded by women my whole life that really do seem to just get better and better with age and so I’ve always felt a sense of anticipation about marking more years off. There are some aspects of aging that are a tough pill to swallow (yes, that would be you, Gravity) but there are other things about youth that I’m so thankful to be tucking away. Ultimately I don’t see the two spaces–youth and aging–as being mutually exclusive. Our past is always cohabitating with the present and our alluring hopes for the future, not to mock us with its absence, but to serve us with its voice. I bring this up because I think that I was a little too happy-go-lucky in my approach to a birthday that I very much want to be a milestone, and now after a summer of some wonderful highs and a few tender lows, I feel more thankful than ever to know that more days are coming.

Last night for the first time in what felt like months, I just existed in the kitchen, making food for the weekend, learning how to move in our new space, occupied by remembering where I’m keeping cutting boards now, and feeling my bangs curl away from the steam of the stove. People feel anxious about growing older because we wonder if we’ve done enough; after many months of doing so much, the feel of a wooden spoon in my hand and a cold cheap beer making its ring on the counter on a Thursday night brought such peace that I can only hope for as much time as I’m being offered to just stay in this space for a while. Peace be with me. And also with you.