Now and Ladybugs

In time, I will get used to the lawn mowers.  That sound, a weekend sound, a nostalgic sound of days off under the blue sky, will fade from the front of my mind into the back.  In time, these suburb summer sounds will soothe me like they did in my childhood, and I won't need speakers in my ears to drown them out. 

But it is fall, and it is not time yet, and I must admit that these soothing suburb sounds make me long for the white-noise quiet of a busy city.

I am on my front porch, battling a bee who thinks he wants my drink.  I used to speak his language a little more fluently, but I now must resort to asking him less politely to be on his way. 

 Why does autumn make us ache?  What are we missing that causes fallen leaves to smell like a cracked heart?  Summer is leaving, and fighting its exit as always.  This is her second summer (a new, but immediately effective measure of time).  I look back at my summers often, both happy and sad to leave them in whichever ocean holds them.  It is a thick photo album.  I have tried to glue it shut on several occasions (even a decade of summers has some cold moments), but the seams don't hold and a song or a smell or a drop of rum on my tongue busts the thing open like a book with too worn a binding.  But this is my summer now.  Tidy and wrapped with a bow.  A beginning and an end.  Less insta-epic, surely, but so much more real.

I have been thinking about what is really is to have a kid.  I'm sure that sounds silly, or late, or obvious, but I've sat deep in it lately, nonetheless.  And as her second summer ends, all I can think of is how fortunate we are to be able to pay youth forward.  What a responsibility, and what an absolute gift.  Every sprinkler I ran through, I can give to her.  Every pile of leaves.  Every snowflake on my nose, every ladybug, every marshmallowy hot chocolate.  Every dandelion summer and every shimmering winter and every Narnia wardrobe or pillow fort or backyard campout.  All of the magic of my childhood is mine.  I hold it in my pocket, and carefully unfold it when I wish on 11:11 or hang Christmas lights, and then I re-crease the soft edges, and put it back where it is safe.  But in truth, all of the magic of my childhood is an heirloom.  It was always meant to be watched after and then given away

I won't have her for as many days as I think I will.  The agony of motherhood is that if you do it right, they come to need you less.  You give your whole life to teaching them magic; how to speak to the bees, how to catch snowflakes, how to fold it all very carefully so they can give it away later.  And you hold their hands until you don't, and you hope that what you gave them was enough.

 I'm not quite sure how to grapple with the juxtaposition of pain and pride that parenthood brings, and so I won't.  Not yet. 

And all the while, I sit on this porch in rare moments alone, and quietly, shamefully, and gradually less often pine for my life of summers and city noise.  In time, I will sit here and pine for the toddler who is asleep in her crib, soothed by the lawn mowers, dreaming only of now and maybe the magic of a few ladybugs.