Author of The Sparrow Sisters
We had a real American Autumn weekend. Which is to say that we raked and baked, had friends in for dinner, ferried Emma about a bit and went to a football game. It was my first and it was a Harvard game. That is to say it was something like watching a particularly fit chess club play football.
I am very good at compartmentalizing. I put things in boxes and baskets all over my house, corralling, herding, filing until there is enough order for me to move on. Those containers are real but there are virtual ones, too. My mother’s death is in a box, as is her life. My father’s ongoing health dramas are packed into a larger box these days. Looking for a ‘forever house’ is in a box marked “I’ve really got to get on that.” London is in a crate marked “Home.” My sons each have a box labeled “College” and my daughter has one currently called “Who the hell is this kid?” Finally, my writing has its own box and I take it out each day. I try to determine what story I will tell and how I’ll tell it. Sometimes I try to remember what I thought I was doing when I started writing at all.
I suppose that title should read, “Past Life in Boxes”. Yesterday David and I went to the warehouse in Canton, Mass. in which over sixteen years of our lives repose–and not in splendor. In 1994, with sons five and two in tow, we moved to London. I won’t say anymore about that because, after these months of writing, if the subject of being a stranger in a strange land were a dead horse, it would be glue by now.
It rained today as Emma and I walked to school. It had started in the night, great gusts of wind and rain hammering at the windows in my bedroom under the eaves. Emma, as used to be the case when David traveled more, slept with me. It had been months since she’d joined me. Her long legs migrated to my side of the mattress and her heat woke me before the rain. Only a few inches shorter than I am, Emma had suddenly taken over not just my bed but my body, in a way. She sprawled, jack-knifed, splayed and scrambled in her dreams until I had to shove her away. I lay in the dark listening to the storm pass through Cambridge and (after the obligatory dead of night stumble to the bathroom) thought about what I’d do the next day if the rain continued.
I find myself strangely shaken by the absence of our two boys. It started on the drive to the airport after we dropped Will off at Kenyon in Gambier, Ohio (where?). It had been bucketing down the whole day before as we unloaded his stuff and settled him into his room. The rain threw itself against his dorm room windows as I tucked in sheets and folded duvets. The wind rattled the frames while David, Will and I stared at his roommate (perfectly nice boy) while he hung a massive American flag over his bed. The sky stayed resolutely heavy and gray all through our jolly dinner on a porch already wet with the day’s weather.
My sister is visiting with her daughter, Lily. A more lithesome, light and lovely girl you couldn’t conjure–unless you grew up with Liza, her mother, who very nearly floated through her first 16 years on long legs and pointe shoes. Now, before those of you who know me too well roll your eyes and take bets on how long before Liza and I cross the Rubicon of sisterhood and kill each other, let me just tell you this; I have not stopped laughing since she got here.
I am slowly coming home. Every time my toes curl into the hot sand at the beach, my fingers pull at a weed in the garden or pluck the clothes pegs from the clean laundry snapping on the line I feel another little root take hold. We have a whole summer to find our way back, a soft landing a friend called it, a place that already feels safe and beautiful and right to us all. We are very lucky.
Still, September is only a month away and already, the sun rises later, the moon looks more golden, dahlias unfurling faster and faster, hydrangeas fading. It is time to think beyond the Cape.
Listen here, Rachael Carson, it’s not that I disagree with you about the effect pesticides have on our environment and future generations. No, I am 100 percent with you on that. It’s just that I have earwigs the size of Smart Cars and they are about to lift my entire raised-bed cutting garden and carry it home to their nest. Now, I picture that nest as a dark, stalactite dripping cave where giant earwigs in evening clothes recline on red velvet couches sipping silver goblets of hydrangea leaf nectar while smaller earwigs gyrate on a down-lit dance floor. Petals nibbled from my dahlias decorate every surface.
I am an early riser and by early I mean shortly after four am. I try to have a lie in, I really do. Don’t hate me because I am wildly productive. I’m not. Occasionally in those pre- or just post-dawn hours I get some stuff done. This morning for instance I folded laundry, made a list of editors that my ms. might appeal to, drank three cups of coffee (my teeth are now itching), went down to the beach to read awhile and then went to the gym. There, I fiddle-faddled around on one kind of machine or another for about 45 minutes before I lost interest in everything from my maximum heart rate to the New York Times Book Review podcast (who cares that a professor from Yale has written about how our reactions to things change depending on what we are told those things are–science of the obvious to me but then I don’t have a PhD.) At any rate, for every morning I use my time wisely, there are the ones where I paddle the internet (I scroll too slowly to call it surfing) checking on Lindsay Lohan’s SCRAM anklet, wondering what will happen to Larry King now that he isn’t CNN’s resident crypt keeper or saving dozens of recipes for complicated dishes I may or may not attempt.
It is right and proper that our last days in London are straight out of some 19th century novel of manners (and summertime). The sky is high and blue, the privet blossoms so fragrant the roses are fighting for attention. Every flower is blooming, the boxwood is such a deep green it is nearly blue and the hollyhocks (hollyhocks, in a city!) are waving like fly fishing poles in the breeze.