My To-Be List

A girl in my position has to be careful. Nine days of freedom. Nine days! And not a single responsibility other than the occasional outing with the mutt.

It is tempting to over-plan these small spaces in our lives. A few days out from Toby and Eliot's trip to Wisconsin, I began a list of all the projects I would tackle in their absence. Clean out the cars! Organize the study! Move the furniture and mop the house! Toby asked me if I would be willing to stain the deck. And maybe the porch, and, oh yeah, how about the shed? My mother invited me to Virginia. I bought 50 Hikes in the Adirondacks, dusted off my boots, and began mapping out how much ground I could cover.

Before leaving for the airport, I made plans to have dinner and drinks with a girlfriend in Glens Falls that same night. This would follow an afternoon of shopping in Albany, going home to walk Fenway, and heading back to pump it up at the Y. Armed with directions to a number of thrift stores near the airport, I had the urge to dump my boys and flee.

But then. There we were, up in the airport observation gallery looking out over a sunny, 180-degree view of the landing strip and gates. Only two aircraft sat on the tarmac. One was a tiny plane with propellers just starting to whirl. Eliot stood on the bench, watching in sheer fascination as one plane landed, another took off. His daddy pointed out the jet that would take them as far as Detroit. A bee buzzed outside the glass. Two helicopters squatted across the airfield, still and quiet. As much as I have hungered for a furlough from all things family, I was unaccountably content just to hang there with my fellas.

I said goodbye at security but could not make myself leave. Don't get me wrong. I'm not remotely sentimental about this, or any, separation from my child. I have been counting the minutes till this day for the past three months. When friends ask me, in a kind of wonderment, "What will you do when they're gone?" I look at them like they're crazy. "Anything? Nothing? Whatever the hell I want?" But even I could not resist watching through the third floor windows overlooking security as Eliot sat down to rip the velcro straps off his shoes. Like a pro, he plunked them in a bin and marched through the metal detector. My miniature jet-setter. Peering over the top of the conveyer belt, Eliot followed his red ladybug suitcase. It popped out of the x-ray machine and he reached up to wrestle it down. As Toby helped him return shoes to their proper feet, my boys looked up at me. I waved goodbye. Eliot, grinning, blew me kisses. One, two, ten. Then, before I was finished kissing back, he grabbed hold of his ladybug on wheels and strode off towards his plane, his grandpa, his camping trip, his time to be a guy without his mommy.

I stopped at exactly two stores before I was shopped out. I headed home early, napped hard after walking the dog. Zumba rocked, but I re-scheduled my girls' night out. Today, after sleeping till the ungodly hour of 9:00am, I wrote seven pages of fiction and read at least twice that, swam in the brisk waters of Lake George, made eggs florentine and whipped my wilting basil into pesto. Not a single one of these items appeared on my to-do list. In fact, I made the command decision about that menacing list. I capped it at nine projects. One for each day. Everything else is just going to have to wait till I'm a mom again. The time in between is for anything. Nothing. Whatever the hell I want.

This small sliver of freedom from responsibility should not become a burden of its own. One of the things parents forget is how to be still in their own skin. Uninterrupted, unscheduled. Unlisted. Pleased simply to make their own acquaintance all over again. Happy with that company and no other.

When All Else Fails

Too many days of rain. It doesn't help that the front entrance of our house faces northeast. The only thing that grows in the root-tangled and rock-pocked patch of earth are uneven spots of scraggly moss. The grayish fur appears to be some alien life-form, slithering over the porch steps and creeping up the walls of our house. In the side garden and along the back, the peas and lilies are equally drunk on the moisture. Their glimmer of southern exposure gives them license to sprawl, languid and shameless, in the faint afternoon light. Out front, however, the barren earth every visitor to our house must pass looks like a molded date loaf.

Sometime about mid-July, it seems every inhabitant of the cloudy north country comes to the dawning awareness of summer's failure to fulfill. We hunger all winter for it, storing our boats and gazing longingly at our swimsuits tucked in the bottom drawer. We itch for barbeques on the lake, kite-flying in a grassy field, biking along mountain trails with our kids pedaling feverishly behind us.

But then comes June. It rains. It rains for hours, then days. It rains for weeks. The lake is too choppy to take the canoe out, and do we want to risk hauling everything to the beach when another downpour is forecast? Then comes July. We grab at murky rays of sun, hang on tight, run with the kite and the kids up the hill, determined, hopeful. We catch summer on the days in between. Not even days. No, in the moments in between.

It appears I have reached that point of realization. Toto, I don't believe we're in Colorado anymore. Summer is not going to come to me, magical, unbidden, warming. Alas, I am simply going to have to fashion a summer out of whatever scraps of color and slivers of light I can find.

So, I decided I'd had it with wilted moss. I mean, I didn't even know moss could wilt, but it appears it does. "Rot" is probably the more accurate term. But whatever it's doing, I have to trudge past and over its feeble attempt at life every time I take the dog for a leak or convey Eliot to the swings or slog groceries into the kitchen. I can't help but wrinkle my nose and try to just get past it. Move quickly. Don't look down.

Tuesday was July 7. Summer, whatever it will be, had arrived and was, in fact, zipping by without a backward glance. So, on yet another gray afternoon, I hauled Eliot out to the car, tried to keep my eyes up, and made a beeline for the local nursery. I asked the helpful fellow who was wandering, aimless and customer-less, among his overgrown annuals, what I could buy to spruce up a shady patch. He pointed me to a clutter of plants without name tags, jostling and expectant, under a tarp tent. They all appeared far too excited to be there. I let Eliot choose whatever drew his attention. He had a difficult time closing in on his preferred shade of pink, but we finally slid a flat of purpley somethings into the back end of the Subaru. We added mulch and a few perennials. As I was packing topsoil into the trunk, Eliot appeared from between the rows holding a single gerbera daisy so astonishingly yellow, I couldn't help but catch my breath. "Can we get this, mommy?" Of course, I told him. It would be criminal not to.

Back at home, we gathered one mud-encrusted Radio Flyer wagon, two pairs of gardening gloves, and several digging implements. Eliot and I picked through the supply of stones the soil here squeezes forth endlessly, maddeningly. We made a soft shape, an oval, a ring of stones. No rectangles or sharp corners for our front yard. We filled it with fresh topsoil, Eliot grabbing up the rich blackness by the fistful and squishing it into our bed. We dug holes. Eliot carried each flower to me in its pot. He held it with two hands, took mincing steps, then plopped it, without any sense of delicacy, onto the earth. We gave those little clumps of roots and petals a new home and a new set of responsibilities in our family. Together, they must remind us to pause when we walk past. To look. They must help us be thankful for the fleeting glories of summer, for rain and light, for this fertile place.

This afternoon, as we packed our gym bags and snacks in the car for a trip to the Glens Falls Y, Eliot strode out on the porch and gasped, "Look at our beautiful garden!" Yes, of course. Look at it!

On the Go

Eleven days (and nights) without a diaper. Today, Eliot received the big grand prize for crossing the underpants finish line: a gleaming, new Thomas bicycle with pedals he can reach.

After a few failed attempts to wheel over the ruts in our gravel driveway left by yesterday's downpour, Gramma Lolly hefted Eliot onto her hip and I dragged the bike into camp. We made our way onto the center green. In the middle of camp is a paved rectangle painted a faded kelly green. It serves as a hockey rink in the winter, a gigantic four-square court in the summer, and a training ground for Eliot's future NASCAR career whenever he feels the need for speed. Two tricycles live under a nearby cabin, and now, a little blue bike resides there, too.

It took the kid about 30 seconds to figure out how to make the bike move. The first few attempts were jerky, of course, as every slight backwards slip of the foot made the wheels stop short. But he kept at it. After a few gentle shoves and a lot of cheering, Eliot was rolling steadily through the giant puddles left by the deluge. He then steered himself around a loopy U-turn, and splashed right back through.