By the time the clock did strike one (in the afternoon), I had just finished putting away the last breakfast dish. Or was it lunch dish? How can you tell one meal from the other?
I felt I had lived a week in the hours leading up to the morning, no, noon-ish meal. Maybe not a week. Maybe 35 years. Or more.
Here's how it all unfolded:
I'm up early again. At sunrise, though there is no sun to give us a hint of the earliness of the hour.
The animals, as yesterday, are surprised. Why the early feed? The bizarrely off-hour walk through the flower fields? But hey, okay, we'll eat now. Humans are strange. We already know that.
By 7, I am in the car, driving again to my daughter's house. First day of school for the kindergartner! He's excited. We're all nervous for him. The older one and the younger one are also getting ready for school. But it's their second day. It's all familiar stuff for them. But how will the middle guy manage??
I drive home, throw down my car keys, and put in an order for croissants at Madison Sourdough. The older kids like fresh croissants for a snack. I can freeze a bunch to have on hand as they plead great unfathomable hunger here after school. (The trick is to freeze croissants when they are still supremely fresh. I once had the idea that frozen two day old croissants would regenerate their freshness in the oven -- as if the staleness never happened. It does not work that way. Freeze straight from the bakery or not at all.)
Then I bike over to pick up my order. That's a 45 minute ride. Perfect on this cooler day.
From there, I bike to the Square, where I have a meetup with a friend with whom I lost contact a good 35 years ago. She lives right here, in Madison, and our families were friends, good friends. Indeed, they hosted a baby shower for one of my soon to be born daughters. Yet eventually life carried us in different directions. The curtain fell. We didn't stay connected.
Why does that happen?
I suppose one answer is that it happens more often if you are "couples friends." Meaning, your friendship stays alive because each of the four people maintains an emotional attachment to the remaining three. It can even stay alive (sometimes) if you feel yourself disconnecting from just one. Any more loosening between the four and you all drift apart. That surely happened to us some three dozen years ago.
But of course, when you retire, and especially if you're no longer married to one of the people in the configuration, then it's a new ball game altogether. It's like hitting the refresh button and looking at an entirely new screen, with some familiar elements still lurking at the sidelines.
So we found each other (it's not hard if you at all participate in social media) and had this date for a coffee and that is how I spent a couple of very lovely hours reviewing 35 years of life.
From there I bike home, and now it's close enough to lunch that I can eat a meal and call it that, or breakfast, since it's composed of typical breakfast foods and Ed joins me on the porch and that's also not a lunch thing, because when have you seen the two of us enjoying a porch lunch together? That's right -- never.
In the early afternoon I drive over to pick up the two big kids at their elementary school. And this is when the rains come down. An unexpected and very localized cloudburst, just as they're letting the first kindergarteners out.
Not knowing that the little kids are let out two minutes earlier, Snowdrop spends a frantic few moments searching for her brother. She finally comes out in the rain and blurts out -- I've looked everywhere!
Um, he's in the car.
We drive home in the pounding rain. Which has not arrived at the farmhouse yet, nor will it be copious once it does.
Yes, their day surely had bumps. Probably more than these two are willing to spell out (Sparrow said something about a noise he did not like!). An interesting article in the NYTimes recently discussed the virtue of not probing too deeply into a child's school experiences, since it is in fact the last bastion of privacy for a child who is otherwise supervised and watched over incessantly by the protective cadre of caregivers. I sort of agree, but not totally -- so I do ask and I work with whatever they want to offer up for discussion.
But, too, the day had awesome moments of joy and independent surges of satisfaction.
Which is as it should be.
At the farmhouse, we are developing new routines. The older girl has reigned here by herself since Covid interrupted a past after-school routine with her brother here. It's important to let her retain some of her favorite habits, but it's equally important for him to feel like his time here is also valuable. We are figuring it out. (Both kids love the farmhouse and so it's actually not too hard to keep them happy here. She'll forever love to read, he'll forever love to build...)
At the end of the day I deposit the two older ones at the school of now only their young brother. It is a joyful reunion of the three. (The squabbling may happen later, but right now, the bond of starting this new school year together, albeit in different classes and structures, is strong and outweighs any competitive urges and surges between the three.)
(waiting for parents to arrive for the pick up...)
I return to a quiet farmhouse. Ed is on his Wednesday bike ride. I settle in to a slightly bigger cooking ambition: I work with our tomatoes to prepare a broth for a hunk of cod that I defrosted for supper. You need to get creative when you have so many tomatoes claiming space on your kitchen counter.
A beautiful day. For me at least. For you as well I hope.
with love...
