Crash, smash, end of summer….

Sure, it’s hot again, but it’s a day without swimming. I’m in the nether in-between place where the youngest is headed back to college, and my life inevitably tips towards the not-so-fun adult things I’ve kicked down the proverbial road. Borrow a spark plug wrench and fix the lawn mower, walk down the hill and ask the young carpenter what to do about that stucco that crumbled from the house foundation, just behind the rose bushes that we sliced away last weekend, tearing away the moss to keep the moisture, moisture from my house.

We are inside and outside all day long, hanging up laundry and sweeping the porch, loading a car… The cats are confused. The kitchen floor is sandy. I think of this day and the next and the few following until I might meet my friend for dinner, exchange our mothering stories, ask what’s happening? what now? what next? This year, I have officially crossed over into the population of the dead mothers club. In a strange kind of way, I find this like membership in the new parents club: once you’re a parent, you’re in, a lifer, whichever way you’re going to take that ride. As for me — and maybe it’s really my suspicion I’ve been poisoned by mold at work — but I turned with an anathema against cattiness and pretense, as if my own death perches on my back just like my daughter now heading back to college classes who hung on my back not that many years ago, her miniature fingers curious against my ears, reaching for wild blackberries. Evenings, the August she was one, I walked her sleep every night as the twilight sank and then laid her, sodden with dreams, on our bed.

So it goes, this rich wild life.

On a whim, I buy a copy of Pearl by Siân Hughes in Montpelier. Oh, novel of my heart:

Had I stopped to think for a minute that the fracture in my family, the rift opened in my own heart, would be passed down to the next generation, through my own damage if nothing else? No, I hadn’t. It never crossed my mind….