Weeding

Predictably, summers grow weeds.  The rain nourishes them.  I spent much of the weekend in the garden pruning, pulling, yanking the sprouts I guessed did not belong.  Since I don't really know what I am doing, I am sure that I sacrificed some real plants for some false ones, mistaking bursts of green for thorns, what is ugly for what is beautiful.  I gardened long into the night until it was too dark to see the clover spuds amidst the hibiscus and hydrangeas. 

These days feel filled with weeds, real and metaphorical, taking things from here to there and back again.  Having moved two kids to college within five days of one another, I have transported my share of belongings.  There is a steep learning curve, twins intensify everything.  Shallow brightly colored bins are the answer, at least for the beginning.

I remember a friend telling me that the only two significant Septembers are the one when your child begins kindergarten and then when that same teenager enters college. Today I saw a mom helping her daughter pick out a backpack for her first day of school.  I was empty-handed, searching for a few things my daughter had forgotten to pack.  Always efficient, she was a little too spare in her choices.

Just before she left, she recommended a book, "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair."A line from that memoir resonated with me today: "Good things have happened before and will happen again.  Moments of beauty and light and happiness live forever."

My nest is not empty.

Bird Nests

When we moved into our house in June, there were two nests in the eaves. Even though the contractor and the architect said to get rid of them, I haven't had the heart yet. Somehow they seemed a symbol of building, of landing, of making a new life. 

We are finally almost settled, just in time for kids to leave for college.  I have been nesting all summer: unpacking boxes, moving things from here to there, finding space I didn't know I had.  It has felt like a homecoming unlike any other I have experienced.  The same has been true in my writing--for the first time in my creative life, I have my own desk where I can make a mess and leave it for morning and no one minds.

The novelist J. Courtney Sullivan said recently that, "When you write fiction you're like a bird making a nest." So too with being a mother, with feathering a nest.

The Piece You Don't Know

In her book, The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver writes, "The most important part of the story is the piece you don't know."

For me, this year has been a series of jigsaw puzzles to be solved.  While I have put some of the bigger ones together, several smaller ones are still missing pieces.  I don't know whether or not I will be able to find them.  Like the last edge piece which sticks out from a puzzle, these absences can be more glaring than the pieces that have been fit together.  I have been thinking a lot about how many pieces I may not ever be able to locate.  At first, this idea was terrifying to me.  In August now, with the weight of the summer passing, I am beginning to see these missing pieces as moments of possibility.  It is what we do with what we do not know that matters.