Everett has been away from us now for five months, one week and four days.

I didn’t know the exact count until preparing to write that first sentence: I haven’t been marking the calendar with an x every day; I haven’t been keeping a countdown.

Which isn’t to say I don’t miss him, that we don’t miss him. Every once in a while, one of us will just say so: “I miss Everett.” A short, honest utterance that is as apropos at a family birthday celebration as it is in an otherwise silent car while waiting at a traffic light. Everett’s absence from among us, while neither unhappy nor unsettling, is also not welcome. Things are not as we prefer them.

He has been serving with YWAM, first in Hawaii and, for the last several months, in the Caribbean–mostly in Haiti. It’s the travel portion of his gap year, a grace of time between high school and college. This was the program he chose: one that allowed him to do some sailing, that gave him a chance to travel and serve others, that fostered his love for Jesus.

Meanwhile, we go about the business of missing him, which on the surface doesn’t look much different from when he is home. We are doing basically the same things–just without Everett.

Of the (now) six of us, Everett is the quiet Stevenson, the one most likely to come or go without announcing it, to be engaged in what he wants to do without bothering anyone else.

In light of that, we have pretended from time to time that he’s still home–which is pleasant for about ten seconds. He could just be downstairs, we tell ourselves, or on his way home from work.

And we jump when he calls. The other night Emma was talking with him, and suddenly she cried out in a pained-but-still-happy sort of way and said, “Everett, I just remembered that thing you do when you want to get a sip of my drink!”

Immediately I saw it, too: Everett leaning toward her glass or drinking straw, pursing his lips, making a silly sound. He does it often enough, but I hadn’t thought of it in months because that joke of a gesture belongs to him.

We were sitting on the living room sofa when he called. I was waiting for my turn to talk with him, and when Emma recalled aloud that simple gesture, my heart just sort of bottomed out from missing him, missing all the things that make him Everett, his inimitable, adorable, silly and deeply thoughtful self.

We have a space in our lives shaped like Everett. No one else can fill that.

***

I think there are two basic types of mothers. The first type watches eagerly for her children to achieve. She wants them to grow up, move on and out, find their way in the world.

The other kind rejoices in the achievements, but does so with a wary eye. She is keenly aware of what these developments mean: that her child will grow up all too soon; the baby she has loved will be gone. Her child’s childhood will be over, and she doesn’t want that. Not really.

Each type has strengths: impulses and practices that nurture children. And, I suppose, each has its weaknesses.

Confession (if you haven’t guessed it already): I fall firmly–for better or worse–into the latter type.

***

I follow an Instagram account that celebrates the glories of early motherhood. In truth, I follow it because I like how its owner decorates her home, but I enjoy the pictures of her several children and the busy-ness that I remember so well.

But there was a picture not long ago that, it would seem, I will never forget– less for the image than the text beneath it. The picture was, of course, Instagram-worthy: outdoors on a bright summer day and a clothesline, draped in bedding, in the foreground. The sun filled the sheets; the sheets gapped and gave on to the focal point: a galvanized tub sitting in the grass, and in it, happily playing, a chubby and apparently naked baby.

It was a beautiful image. A scene of domestic contentment, of cleanliness achieved in exceptional simplicity.

And the text beneath it, in the voice of the Instragammer herself: “My mother told me that I will never be this happy again.”

Is that true? Is that springtime of life, when one’s children are very small, the happiest time? When you know they are safe in their beds at night, their stomachs full of good things and their minds with pleasant dreams?

When nothing goes truly wrong for them and–if it does–you can make it all go away?

***

Everett went off to school in the second grade, age seven-and-a-half. I had homeschooled him and his siblings before that. His world was his house and his backyard, the neighbor children and cul-de-sac, errands with mom and playdates with friends and the climbing structures on the mulch-lined playgrounds of our church.

His siblings took to school without hesitation, but this was not true for Everett. He struggled mightily for a month with a level of distress we didn’t quite know how to handle. The fact that I was teaching at his school was of no comfort: we were in separate buildings, and his building felt huge. The children in the hallways overwhelmed him; the noise and even the smells of this unfamiliar place were too much.

There came a day when he was able to articulate his problem. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his classroom, his teachers, his new friends. It was that he wasn’t sure I knew where he was. With trips to the gym, the art and music rooms, with excursions to the playground, how could he be sure we could find each other at the end of the day?

As if I would leave school without him. As if I wouldn’t notice, pulling out of the parking lot, that he wasn’t in the car.

As if, were he to go missing, his father and I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to find and bring him home.

So I printed out a copy of his class schedule, and I hung it above my desk, and I showed it to him. See, I told him. Now I will always know where you are.

It helped.

***

In my most recent conversation with Everett, he told me about a weekend trip he had just returned from. They hiked to a remote region of Haiti, to a community of people who live without electricity or running water. Everett and his friends slept on benches or in their hammocks, and the nights were frigid. The days were spent getting to know the people who lived there and helping with a building project. And then they hiked home again.

Everett said it was his favorite part of his time in Haiti.

***

To say that I don’t miss my children’s childhoods would be a lie. For many reasons, their childhoods were a difficult time, but that hasn’t stopped me, far more than once, from wishing it all back again.

I think I remember mostly in photographs. I see images in my mind of them doing this or that. If I give myself a minute, I can conjure a voice or a recollected phrasing. There are the things Bill and I repeat to one another, something he or she said that have become part of our lexicon, even part of our way of articulating the world.

But was I happiest then, when they were young? Could the world–and life–be at its best for me when, for them, the world was sometimes overlarge and frightening?

Or am I happier now–for all I miss their littleness–when one of them is happily married, another showing such strength of character on soccer field, in school chorus, and among her peers in the hallways of her high school?

And when one of them ventures to Haiti and spends months of his young life there, who says that it is difficult but never complains, who sees and comes to love and appreciate  lives so different from his own?

***

Everett comes home in sixteen days and about one and a half hours. Among others, I will be waiting for him at the airport.

I think he will be able to find me easily enough.

The post Missing Everett appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was six, they had sold it. They had their apartment in the city and the house where my parents live now, the one we return to every summer, the one “Out East,” we say, at the almost very end of Long Island.

But some of my earliest memories are from the Stony Brook House, and although the image in the email was merely a floor plan, just a map drawn up in pencil, I recognized each room immediately.

I was alone in my house when I saw it, but I think I gasped aloud. I looked down at a two-dimension drawing on the flat screen of my cell phone, but what I saw somehow was the full house, upright, entire. Room for room, closet, bathroom, window. The yard, the front porch, the smell of the boxwood out front, and the way the sunlight came into the rooms.

***

Lisa grew up just outside of D.C. Her house was a split level with columns across the front on a lot marked with grand old trees. She moved there with her family when she was two and called that house home through her college years. Now in her early forties, she and her siblings last year completed a difficult if not-uncommon task: they helped their aging parents sort through a lifetime of things, gather up what they needed, and move closer to family.

The house quickly sold to some people from Boston. They bought it without seeing it first-hand, via website and an obliging realtor. It fetched an excellent price.

Recently, Lisa told me she’d had news of her childhood home: it’s gone. They razed it. Not just the house, but the entire property: the trees and all the grass. So it wasn’t the house the buyers were after, apparently. It was the lot.

That is, of course, their prerogative.

But just yesterday, Lisa mentioned it to me again in passing. Just a quick comment that opened a view onto loss. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. And she has a full life here in North Carolina: a lovely home of her own, a thriving marriage, three beautiful children. But the empty lot reported by her sister is nonetheless on her mind. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. “I’m still sad.”

***

My sister and her husband have a large old house in the country in western Massachusetts. It’s set back from the road; you have to know where to look, when passing, to see one ivory peak under the roof and a window next to the chimney.

It was built in 1922 and is quietly grand: warm wood floors; glass doorknobs; built-in bookcases and a broad staircase, with landing, that descends into a generous center hall.

It has a second staircase that goes to what might have been servants’ quarters, but if the house ever enjoyed that kind of exalted service, it’s long lost to memory. My sister and her husband bought the house nearly ten years ago from a widow who had lived there alone for a long time.

But one afternoon, not long after they moved in, my sister found herself with smiling and unexpected guests in the driveway. It was a woman with her grown daughter, and the woman explained that she had grown up in that house, perhaps forty years before.

Together they walked through the rooms, the woman recalling to her daughter and my sister how her family had lived in those spaces. This had been her brother’s room; here they had done their homework. Her mother had the sewing machine in this room, and they would talk together while they did their school work and she sewed. And on Christmas mornings, she and her siblings stood like this on the staircase, waiting for their parents to call them into the living room, with the fireplace blazing to warm the room, to the Christmas tree and the presents.

***

The news this morning is of fires continuing to rage in California. With no rain in sight and a persistent dry heat, the fires have progressed, at times, to consume the length of three football fields in a minute.

The path of these fires is indiscriminate. Houses, streets, wineries, strip-malls– they eat through everything, and their wake is charred shells of places, barely recognizable rubbish. One can identify remains because of where they are, not what.

The damage from a hurricane is different: belongings disappear completely or are found the length of a football field away. In its rage, a hurricane trashes things, hurls them, twists rain gutter and rebar alike.

We have had too much of this kind of thing lately. And the news is of the loss of life and property, of businesses undone. Of the incalculable costs and where to turn for recompense or justice. Of fear and failed infrastructure and climate change, of when and where this will happen again.

***

Of course in all instances like these, the loss of life is the most terrible of the losses.

But in my privileged and safe distance (this time) from disaster, I find myself caught on the loss of homes. Be it trailer, apartment, or warm wood floors and columns out front, a home is a shelter from the elements. The place to come in from the wind and rain, a filter for light and weather.

At its best, a home is also a filter for everything outside. It’s a space where one can be still and can be oneself unmolested, where one can comfortably consider what it means to be alive in the world even while enjoying a little distance from it.

I know that not everyone has a home, and that not every home is safe.

But a home should always be someplace safe. And it should never be snatched indiscriminately from the landscape.

***

Waiting at the traffic light, Emma and I saw them emerge from the house: the boy, maybe seven; his sister, five. Both with their heads down, their sandy brown hair drifting at their ears, the napes of their necks. He descended first, and she followed with their mother, and each of the children wore backpacks.

The steps to their house are concrete and slathered in leaves. Their window blind was closed crookedly, and a bluebird house sat askew on the tree next to their front walk.

They live in one of those charming old neighborhoods that has recently been rediscovered in Durham, and as we drove away I wondered if those children knew that. I thought of their backpacks and their mother, of the school-day awaiting them both. Of the bluebird house and the window-blind and maybe the lunches inside their backpacks.

I am glad to think that the up-and-coming-ness of their neighborhood– for now, anyway– probably makes no difference to them at all.

***

We have an empty bedroom in our house. Will won’t be coming back to it, as he got married in July. And Everett is gone for six months, on the travel portion of his gap year.

The boys shared that room for fourteen years, and it looks pretty much the way it did when they slept there every night, except that, for now anyway, there are no clothes lying–clean or dirty–on the floor.

Many times as I walk past that room, I think how glad I am of where they are now, that they have left us and are on their own doing brave, interesting, meaningful things.

But more often, I think of a single afternoon –which may have happened just as I recall it, or it may be an amalgam of many:

It is late spring or early fall. Their sister is upstairs sleeping. They are eight and six, or seven and five, and the Legos are spilled around them on the floor. The sun is shining through the windows and they are playing in it.

All they know is the Legos and perhaps Star Wars and, in a peripheral and obvious way, each other. They don’t know the sunlight, they don’t know the carpet or the bunk-beds, the desk or the dresser, because these things are just as they should be.

And their mother is nearby somewhere. Upstairs, probably. It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that she is standing there, just for a quick minute, to watch her sons playing in the sunlight on the floor.

The post Home appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The post was on Instagram: a gorgeous seaside photograph, the image drenched in sunset. A lone figure stood looking at the ocean, her back to the camera. The caption: “Goodbye, summer.”

This was a month ago, maybe more. That time when college students return to campus, but nearly a month before my daughter returned to high school.

Still, the Starbucks was selling pumpkin spice again.

And in the grocery store that same week, one-fourth of the magazine facings in the check-out line advertised autumn: soup, pumpkins, the “perfect fall decor.”

All of it felt too soon to me. Just a tad on the early side.

***

But that was weeks ago, before Tuesday, when a chance encounter with a wreath on sale (just a short detour from my errand to the cat food) found me bringing home both the wreath and a pair of somewhat autumnal pillows.

“I’m going to decorate for fall,” I told Everett, to which he responded that fall didn’t begin until Thursday.

Which is today. I had already wished Bill a Happy First Day of Fall when I googled the equinox and learned that, this year, fall begins on the 22nd, which is tomorrow.

And which is fine. Today I have cleaned the bathrooms and sorted laundry and had a lovely visit with my daughter-in-law. Between these things, research, writing, and the gym, the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow.

***

When I was teaching, I was annually annoyed by the school calendar’s eclipsing summer. It was hot as blazes out, the locusts’ song filling the air. But that return to school felt like fall nonetheless.

When I was growing up, my next-door neighbor had grown children of her own. She was past the days of packing lunches and waving children to their bus stop. She didn’t work outside her home. But she still felt the encroachment of the school year. I’ll never forget her saying it: “The shadows always seem longer on the first day the school buses come.”

Back in my classroom in mid-August, prepping for my students’ arrival, I saw the trees outside standing listless in the heat and reminded myself that it was still summer. Just because I had to be in the school building all day didn’t mean that summer had ended. Summer wasn’t actually over until the latter part of September, academic calendars notwithstanding.

I told my children we would pack our bathing suits and towels in the car and go directly to the pool after school. We would be driving right past it, anyway. Why not change our clothes there and go for a swim and enjoy what was left of a summer day before it was time to head home for dinner?

This was my hope and plan every year, especially in our earliest years at school together, before soccer practice and games began dictating our plans for us. Which was fine.

Recently Emma reminded me that we did it once: we managed to go straight from school to pool, and I was glad to hear it. She told me this just a few days ago, and despite the time lapse, despite having forgotten it myself, I still felt a little triumphant: we had managed once to eke some summer out of the school year. Well done, us.

***

“The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad, monotonous song. ‘Summer is over and gone,’ they sang. ‘Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.'” – E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

***

That little gem of a novel– one of my all-time favorites– tracks life on a farm, and in so doing, tracks the seasons. It has to. An agrarian culture necessarily lives with an eye on the sky and a finger on the pulse of these greater changes, the shift from winter to spring, summer to fall.

But most of us in my neck of the woods don’t match their everyday actions to the changes in season. Unless, of course, there’s a hurricane.

***

The difference between today and tomorrow, between all the days since March 20th of this year and now, has everything to do with the earth’s revolution around the sun and its knack of leaning in a perpetual tilt. These factors combined mean that tomorrow at 4:02 EST, the sun will pass directly over the celestial equator.

Our days have been growing shorter since the summer solstice on June 21st. Tomorrow the days will only continue to grow shorter. But for the day, the amount of sunlight in the northern and southern hemispheres will be exactly the same.

And if I am able to get my research and writing done, I will pull my fall decorations off their shelf in our storage room and place them strategically around the house.

***

I like fall.

But there is something about summer, isn’t there? I think that, more than the holidays, more, even, than the birthdays of my family, summer works for me like the hinge of the year. I mark many things by the before and after of summer, the “this” summer and “last.”

I remember thinking in middle school about those phrases. “This summer” meant now, but during the first few weeks of school, at the very least, it also meant the summer that had only just recently been with us. I  remember wondering when it was, exactly, that we went from “this summer,” (as in: “this summer we went to Disney World”) to “last” (as in, “last summer, we went to the beach”).

What do we use to mark that shift? It’s a vague happening at best, or maybe it depends more on weather: you know to use “last” instead of “this” when it’s time to wear a jacket?

Or maybe we can just hang it on the equinox. Maybe we inadvertently do. Maybe today I say, “My son got married this summer,” and tomorrow I’ll say, “We traveled to British Columbia for Will’s wedding last summer.”

I’ll let you know.

***

Friday, 22 September, 7:39 AM

And now it is autumn, or maybe it will be at 4:02 PM EST when the sun drifts over that celestial equator. Strange to think we can mark time via a movement that isn’t a movement at all (the sun doesn’t move, right?), and that the line in question is invisible, is, in fact, nonexistent.

Far more to the point, in my world, anyway, is what will happen five days from now: Everett’s departure for six months, the travel portion of his gap year between high school and college. This shift will have far greater currency with some of us than the fall decor I may pull out today, or the cheerful autumn wreath on any door, or the earth’s steady revolution around the sun.

(They grow up so fast. Has it come to this already? I am eager and excited and so ready on his behalf, but if anyone had asked, I would have had his childhood last twice as long. Except that would be so selfish.)

***

And now it is 8:08 AM and time for a fresh cup of coffee and to make Emma’s lunch, to start the laundry I didn’t finish yesterday, to see my neighbor walk her son up the hill to the elementary school.

Today, fall is newborn and Everett and I will check his packing list and go shopping for shoes.

In five days we will take him to the airport, and before we know it (right?) he will come home again, and in no time at all, all of this will be a very long time ago.

The post Marking Time appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

1. we are on borrowed time and
2. this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

The post Field Day appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

She posts a picture of her alarm clock: 5:45 AM, and the words, “Only Wednesday.”

***

She is my workout buddy on Wednesdays, younger than I by, perhaps, twenty-five years. We are warmed up, waiting to run, to heave the barbells, to do the burpees. The clock is ticking and we are talking about the days, about last week’s class, about what we’ve been up to.

I can’t remember the context exactly, but her words make sense and also are words I might have said–words I did say–years and decades ago, but nothing that I say anymore.

She says, “It’s a good thing. It makes the time go faster.”

***

He is home from class, making his lunch before launching into his to-do list. Which is considerable. He is in the kitchen and I am on the deck, talking with him through the open door that gives on to the breakfast room in this house we moved into when he was two and where once, long ago and yesterday, I painted his two-year-old belly with a smiley face.

I say aloud, “I can’t believe it’s already the 25th of January.”

And he says, “I know. I’m so glad.”

Because he’s getting married in July, and when you’re getting married in July, you want it to be July Right Now.

I smile to myself, and I don’t say what I know: July will be here in five minutes.

The post Perspective appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking spots in the senior lot. Would they vie for a spot when they are seniors, and Katherine’s someday first car being a motor home. They did not talk about classmates, about other students, although the conversation sometimes goes this way. Because what is high school–around coursework and extracurricular everything– but a time in close proximity to people who are and are not like you, the joys and challenges this brings?

The girls’ school sits in a beautiful block of our city, one whose approach is filled with small and charming houses, sidewalks, tall trees. The school itself is a sprawling, seven-building affair, lined with trees but leaving little room for lawn, except in front of the middle school. On Thursday morning, I saw and heard something I’d never noticed before: that lawn filled with students literally at play.

I was, of course, driving. The car-line and commuter traffic is considerable here. I couldn’t pay close attention to these middle-schoolers on the lawn. But Katherine explained that this was a privilege granted to students who maintained grades to a certain standard, and by evidence of their apparent enjoyment, this seemed a worthwhile reward.

I tried to watch them–impossible–as I drove past. What they were busy at, if everyone was included. Who was engaged, how they were playing. And if anyone–isn’t there always someone who does?–stood or sat alone.

If I look for the source of this impulse, probable causes assert themselves one after the other. When I taught school–so recently, so long ago–I made it my business to like every one of my students. Because we learn better, don’t we?, from the people who earnestly like us for who we are. When I think of my own children at school–long ago or now–and the pain I feel at their potential isolation. When I think of seventh grade and how I hoped to have someone to sit with at lunch. Or when I hear (rare, once?) the story from my father, brilliant but not athletic as a child, who stood against the brick wall of his school during gym class, enduring.

I tried to get a clear look at the middle schoolers, but they moved like leaves blown over the lawn, and I didn’t know any of them.

Thursday morning was beautiful. The morning light slanted in its warm way through the buildings and the trees. I pulled up to the drop-off point, and like a fool I said to the girls as they got out of the car that every one of them is precious. All the students in the school are precious, I said, even the one who makes you cry in math. Because on the second day of school this year a boy in someone’s math class made her cry. We are not naming names.

The girls are not sure they agree with me when it comes to who is precious and who isn’t, and they said so as they hurried out of the car, pulling their backpacks behind them, slamming the doors.

I proceeded, slowly, through the line.

It was September. It is still September, and it’s not fall yet, not quite autumn if you’re going by the calendar that marks the solstice and equinox. When I was teaching and the school calendar all too soon eclipsed what was left of summer, I insisted on the equinox, if only to myself, and that fall didn’t arrive until September 21st.

It goes too fast: this life, these days. Unless you are in high school. Or middle school, which may be worse.

It was still summer on that warm Thursday morning, as I proceeded in the burnished morning light through the car lines. The trees were still green: the decorative pear by the high school’s front entrance, the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Then I drove under the live oaks. A wind gusted, and leaves like amber blades spun down and cut the air. Emma and Katherine were out of the car; they had gone their separate ways, but for a few moments still in the car line, I was driving next to Emma and watching her in my way. She did not look at me, already focused on the day ahead, already at school. But I watched her as I slowly pulled past, saw her beautiful blonde hair and watched as she was enveloped into the school.

The post Morning Drop-Off appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

You hear them, too, as soon as you step outside, or even through the open window which you can now (mercifully) leave open all night: the crickets, singing day and night invisibly from the grass. Their song always sounds like bells to me– the Christmas kind– a steady jingle in the lower registers. And it sounds, too, like other autumns, older ones, ones in Pittsburgh when I was a child, and this makes me wonder if in Pittsburgh summers the crickets sing all day or if, like here, the song comes as a harbinger of fall. I don’t remember.

My next-door neighbor in Pittsburgh, Mrs. Ramsay (every summer I used to cut some of my mother’s roses and take them to her, wrapping their stems carefully in damp paper towels; she was beautiful and terribly old and had exquisitely smooth skin and white hair and wore dresses), said once that summer seemed to end– no matter what the date was– just as soon as school started. She said the shadows were suddenly longer on the first day the school bus came. We would walk past her house to the busstop.

And now the humidity is gone and the crickets are singing and it’s been twenty-two years since I’ve ridden a school bus. And all along my driveway– just quietly there– the roses are blooming again.

The post September appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.