Growing Versions

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I've felt this way before  and no doubt I will again, after all it is seasonal, but this time of year always confuses me.  It is warm enough that part of me gets tricked into thinking summer is just about to begin.  Another part of me, stumbles over a trip wire that signals a torrent of let's make soup, plan Christmas and nesting feelings. When I walk off the beach for the final time of the season, it feels like a raw wound opens in my chest. In time, slowly, the two broken flaps of skin find each other and knit together quietly.

He comes here and then I go there and then he comes here, it's a pattern. I eat toast and then cereal and then toast, it's a pattern. I decorated it with purple and yellow and purple, it's a pattern. Making a snack is easy. Cracker, peanut butter, cracker, cheese whiz, cracker, it's a pattern.

We have had a sick boy on our hands and one of the many ways that he has endured it is dreaming up pranks and admiring this girl's hacks.  The balloon one especially keeps on giving and now I have a balloon phone case which I cannot show you because it masks my camera.  He's perfected this one! We have started to make a list so we can unsystematically try them all. Main ingredients, ballons, glue, glow sticks and more glue.

Right from his era of breastfeeding on demand, my son has continually made it clear that he feels every morsel that passes his lips needs to involve me.  Long ago, my daughter began to independently retrieve an apple from the fruit bowl or prepare her own cereal.  My son likes food eating to be a collaborative affair. And by collaborative, I mean prepared and presented by me. As a little one, even when the piece of fruit was within reach, he would holler to be fed. I think it's because he likes to be social when he eats and feels that when I send him alone into the kitchen to get a snack, he is being banished. Lately though, since he's started grade 2, his teacher has been maximizing the use of the school's kitchen garden and he has started to take it upon himself to prepare snacks for himself and us. Last night, he presented a snack to his father of Lunenburg pudding ( a local delicacy, like sausage) sprinkled with cheese, pumpkin seeds and lemon juice.  Surprisingl...

We had a big heart break this week. A huge set of boxes, which had housed new electronics and had been discarded by the neighbours, got chucked away or dragged away by someone before we could get our hands on them. This was troubling for the kids as they had already constructed some lofty projects with them in their minds (a car, an apartment, a village). One gave up entirely, until another day... The other settled for a much smaller box with interesting inserts. "Beach front property."2015

Mail boxes affixed to gates and front doors are soon to become quaint relics.  Hand delivered mail will be the thing of legend. How did the mail get in the box Mama?  How did the letters arrive? They were delivered by hand, my darling.

Waiting is like re-arranging furniture. You move a chair and then you are forced to move a lamp and then the couch while you seek an arrangement that you can live with.

The kids marched off to school this morning.  They chose their own outfits, one actually bought hers with her own money, they lead the way and away they went.  My role in getting them ready was minimal this time. When I got home, I felt strangely sad. I have never noticed this sadness on the first day of school before.  Over the summer, I had them in my grasp, we floated and dived together and roasted marshmallows and made crazy plans.  They got bored, found ways not to be bored and slid back into boredom again. The ups and downs of their lives over the summer were directly observable by me, but they can't live in there forever. Now they have left the jar, they have been released into territory I can't always know or understand. They'll return at the end of the day full of stories and information from that tall grass over there.