Maybe nature knows, how the gifts are only borrowed. From nest to song, how it’s all impermanent. We’re given everything we need between sky and tree, but it has always been for the sharing. We were meant to live in the birdsong.
I think all creative ideas (and I’m including love here, perhaps topping the list) are like dandelion seeds floating on a summer breeze, with the bravest of barefoot children chasing them, stretching to pluck them from the blue, knowing if they don’t, there are countless chubby legs running behind and beside, willing to make the journey. And just as the summer child borrows the fleeting day, I gather the words and the paint, into the shape of love, and hope and try and pray it makes it to the next season.
Painting in a new room yesterday, brush in hand, I sang along with each stroke, the Christmas songs so generously lent to me, to us, each year. Within the music, somewhere on the canvas, I am suspended in time, in the gift of the moment. No doors of advent are opening. No rushing toward the next. I’m catch myself in the song of the bird, in a moment of happiness, and I find myself in the most wonderous gift of all. I know I won’t keep the painting. It must be shared. Chubby summer legs will be waiting.
“Cooler days will be coming way sooner than you think.”
I knew my mother was right, but I was bound and determined to wear my one new fall outfit for the first day of seventh grade at Central Junior High School. It had been on lay-a-way at Herberger’s Department store since the end of July. I went with my mom every store visit, the clerk letting me try it on each time as my mom paid down a little bit more. The ensemble, a word I had just learned, was a pair of chestnut gaucho pants with a striped matching turtleneck and knee length socks. In the comfort of the air-conditioned fitting room, I marveled in the three-way mirrors, knowing, I think for the first time, the feeling my mother had when doing the same. You can call it vanity, but I don’t think so.
I watched her get dressed each morning. Piece by piece. It was an exercise in confidence. From shoes to earrings, it was a path to get out the door. A boost. A head-start, some days in an inconceivable race.
I attended sixth grade in that same school, but our classrooms were placed in an upstairs corner. We didn’t interact with the seventh through ninth graders. We used the side entrance, across from the Police Station. Let out only for lunch and gym, we were nearly invisible. But not this year. This year we were going to be a part of the Junior High School Class! Of course at the bottom, but in the race nonetheless. Everything would be brand new. I knew I needed those gaucho pants. My mother knew it as well. She didn’t put up a fight.
The Superintendent’s office that she worked in was located in that same school, just under the sixth grade classrooms. I rode with her to work. We had entered the same side door for a year.
This first day of my seventh grade year, I got dressed in her bedroom. She had the only full length mirror in the house. We drove through town with the windows rolled down. But she didn’t turn on our usual street. “What are you doing?” I asked, “Aren’t you going to park where you normally do?” “Yes, I will,” she said, “but after I drop you off. Today, you’re going through the front entrance.” I couldn’t stop smiling as she pulled up in front of the big double doors. I didn’t even notice the beads of sweat near my baretted bangs. I waved goodbye. I saw my reflection in the glass trophy case that welcomed the students. I guess it was meant for aspiration, but I already had mine — it, she, was driving to park by the side door.
