I’m still not sure I’m back–that I can maintain this thing, but it’s been liberating, this freeing myself from feeling obligated to write here. Sometimes I think it’s a minor miracle when I reach the end of the week and realize I wrote FIVE columns for the Family Education site.  Sometimes I stare at the screen and think I can’t possibly have anything to say, yet the switch clicks on and I write, and end up sounding more or less coherent, I think.

Perhaps the day will come when I won’t have anything to say, and the thought of that looms large in my head. I think anyone who writes, or paints, or is an artist whether through photography or sculpture or architecture, lives in fear of the day the creative juices will dry up. I know my grandfather mourned this for many years before he passed away. When he stopped painting he surrounded himself with his old paintings and talked about them every day. Yet I’m sure he was haunted by the loss of his ability to paint. This must have eaten away at him, like a sore, or a gnawing bone pain.

Anyway, I’ll wait and see what I can turn out in the coming weeks. I’m still dabbling with my novel-in-progress. Last night I dreamt it was finished, yet it’s nowhere near that. Of course I also dreamt that tiny golden fish were swimming around in the air in front of me, and that I couldn’t catch them, so I’m not sure I’d put much stock in any of my dreams at this point.

I have learned, too, that it does not always compute that as your kids get older, you have more time for these things. I think I have more brain for them, but not more time. It’s taken roughly six or seven years for the part of my mind that was cleaved in two when I became pregnant and was raising young ones to mend.

And now I have to use this precious window of time, on this gray and cold Sunday, to write my Family Education column for tomorrow. The kids are watching a show or two and in some alternative universe there’s the me I want to be right now. I steal away to my little windowed room, I flex my fingers over the computer keyboard, I take several deep breaths, like a diver preparing for the dive, and I plunge into my writing. The characters stretch and smile when they see me, happy that I’ve come at last.

I think all kids must go through this. I think it’s also one of the most painful–if not THE most painful–milestones in a child’s life. I dreaded having to explain life and death to my own kids. We’ve never had to really talk about it with L. I’m sure he has thought about it, but because he has such a hard time articulating abstract concepts and emotions he’s never asked about it, and there have never been an real opportunities to discuss it. But I know it’s there– a huge elephant in the room.

T. has been thinking about it though. In her sunny, chirpy way she brings it up now and again (can you bring up death in a sunny, chirpy way?). When I tuck her in at night she clings to my neck.

“Don’t go Mama! I’m afraid of your dying!”

But she’s so easily reassured–at least I think she is. Maybe she lies awake, wrestling with this in her own way, in the dark, surrounded by her stuffed animal friends, with their loving, fuzzy faces. Maybe. Tonight she asked me if everything dies.

“Yes,” I told her. “Everything that’s alive dies.”

“Except people,” she said confidently with a smile.

I imagined a world in which people didn’t die, and that I could tell her this. But instead I told her that even people die, when they’re really, really old.

“I’m not old,” she declared, stretching her arms out into the dark.

I always have mixed feelings about traveling for Christmas. A part of me longs to wake up in our own house, and have the kids tumble downstairs to find their presents and stockings. I want to make a pan of cinnamon rolls, as I did that one Christmas when we spent it at home (the December right before T. was born. Being heavily pregnant grants you the right to stay home), and a pot of coffee–in my own kitchen. I want to craft the morning and the day for my kids the way I want it. But I am always torn; the one year we did stay here for the holiday I missed my family. It was sad to think about Christmas going on without us. If my family would revision the Christmas celebration, perhaps creating new traditions to replace or build on the old, then there would be a way for us to have the best of both worlds.

I think one of the best gifts you can give your children is to free them to revision their holidays. Teach them to preserve the importance of family traditions–ones handed down from great-grandparents to grandparents, to parents, to children, but free them to build their own new ones around the old, like the layers of a shell added to the central design, the core. I hope when I’m older, and my kids are out on their own, that they will want to come back to some of the traditions that have been important to our family of four, but that they will feel free to birth new ones, too, and that I will be proud and accepting of that.

I’ve been thinking about beginnings and endings a lot today; coincidentally T. clamored all morning to watch Charlotte’s Web this afternoon and we did. I so sympathize with Wilbur, poor soft-hearted pig who just can’t stand how fleeting life is, and how everything must inevitably comes to a close, who mourned his unlikely friend Charlotte, and who so believes in the power of friendship. Oh but those beginnings and endings, they really got to Wilbur.

I love that pig–I forgot how teary the story makes me, though. Then I looked over and I saw T.’s lip trembling at the most poignant moment (when Charlotte bids farewell to Wilbur). My soft-hearted girl!

*********

And around this time of December I am always struck with a little melancholy. I think I can remember feeling like this when I was a child, too. I love Christmas so much but even as we gear up for the holiday I feel it coming to a close. When I was little I had so much anticipation for Christmas that it was a big let-down when the day was over, and the magic began to dissolve into the air and it was back to life as usual. There’s a quality of suspended animation almost to Christmas; time stands still, for weeks it’s all about the Christmas tree and the lights, the smell of cookies baking, the mystery of packages and wrapped boxes. Then in a flash almost it’s done and time clicks forward a notch, all the Christmas memories are swept away and packaged up with the artificial tree (or dragged to the curb with the poor dying one) and this year’s favorite ornaments, and the next year everyone will be a year older, and the cycle begins again.

I have one copy of the manuscript somewhere in our crawl space. Last I looked I was missing about twenty pages, and maybe they are there, just jumbled between other chapters. Sometimes I’ll lazily think: I really must dig that thing up and rework parts of it, but I never do. Still, I have such a soft spot for that book–and for the person I became as I wrote it. I think the book is good, actually; or maybe it’s not. Maybe I haven’t dug it up because I want to preserve some idealized impression of it.

Maybe.

“We’ll be seeing more of that type of thing, mark my words,” the man said to the lady at the front desk. She hmmmmd some response.

“You know, because of the economy.” He really didn’t need to add that last part, because everyone in that waiting room knew exactly what he was talking about. Exactly. And even if I don’t know why that man wanted to end his life in so dramatic and tragic a way, I felt sad for him the rest of the day. I thought about George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, trying to take the plunge in almost the same way. He was saved by that  bumbling angel, of course. I wonder if that man from yesterday will look back on his own life and imagine what would have been if he hadn’t existed, or whether he’ll be able to see his way out of whatever it is that’s got him so backed into a corner.

After the appointment we finished some shopping and everywhere there were other shoppers, all carrying their own private secrets–sorrows and joys–around with them as they shopped. I suppose we were, too. And I felt that old superstitious fear I used to have when I was little when things were going too well–that breath holding, where you worry that any second now it will all shift.

I traveled far from that sunlit room in the years between then and now. I became a mother of two kids, a boy and girl. we moved four times since then, the rabbit died, the cat, too. I moved from that writing room, to a large closet, to a desk in a guest room, to nowhere at all, to an office again–a shared one, but a room with a view nonetheless. The desk sits in front of a window again–a necessity, I think. Through the panes I can see the tops of the holly trees, and the trunks of pines taller than the house, taller than two of these houses put together. Somehow I have found myself sharing the space again with another rabbit, a brown-haired quiet fellow, and the dog sleeps behind me, on a soft brown bed. She’s black and white too, like the cat. Last night, when I sat here to check e-mail, I heard one of the huge barn owls that live in the neighborhood hooting out into the night, an intense, purposeful sound, cutting through the too-warm night air.

I am happy; the road from then to now hasn’t been straight or predictable, but I’m happy with where I find myself today, on this day, in this space.

It’s been at least seven or eight years since I last read that particular poem by T.S. Eliot.  I had no idea why I woke up with that line in my head; I haven’t been thinking about that poem, or about Eliot at all. I know the brain does strange things when sleeping, but I wondered why my subconscious had chosen to pull out that line from the dusty recesses of my brain (it is feeling pretty dusty in there these days) and move it to the forefront of my brain, where it rattled about over and over again all morning long.

I grow old…I grow old…

Was I worried about growing older?  Wearing my trousers rolled? Measuring out my life with coffee spoons?

It wasn’t until I was cutting up the newly baked loaf of bread for L. this morning and my knife crackled into the crust that the connection was made clear. I was amazed, then, by how memory can be so triggered by something as simple as the sound of a bread machine in a quiet house and the smell of freshly baking bread.

The last time we used the machine on timer mode was about eight years ago.  We had just acquired the bread maker and in the summer of 1998 we were living in our funky apartment in upstate New York.  Bread machines seemed all the rage among our group of graduate students–everybody had one; everybody was making bread–why, it was the Summer of the Bread Machine.  Scott and I would toss the ingredients in about dinnertime and by 11:00 we’d have a new loaf ready to eat.  Sometimes on the weekend friends would stop by on their way back from a bar outing and we’d invite them in and have wine, fresh bread and cheese and talk into the night. Coincidentally, at around the same time we were whipping up batches of fresh bread while we slept, I was also studying for my qualifying exams. I read constantly.  The Summer of the Bread Machine was also the Summer of Books. I would take the bus into school, arrive there around 9:30, shut myself into my little office, and read and read until about noon.  Then I would take a break, head to the gym, and swim laps for about 1/2 an hour. Back to my office for lunch (a packed sandwich and a soda from the machine in the hall), and then more reading and notetaking until about 4:00 in the afternoon. It was also the Summer of T.S. Eliot and his other Modernist pals.  I must have read just about everything by and about Eliot that summer.  By the time August came I felt as if he and I were kindred spirits–I knew him so well I could have walked into a room and started discussing any number of literary topics with him and known exactly what his responses would be.

And it was also probably one of the more personally and selfishly fulfilling summers I’ve ever spent.  We didn’t have kids, so my time on campus was entirely mine and entirely guilt-free.  By the time 4:00 p.m. rolled around I had put in a full day’s work, so I could enjoy my evenings without feeling as if I should be doing something else.

So when that bread machine cranked on at 4:00 a.m., in an entirely different context and about 8 years later, my mind must have kicked up that line from Eliot’s Love Song; almost a reflexive action, perhaps. It’s amazing to me how powerful unconscious memories can be: a smell, a remembered line from a once-loved poem–like a time capsule opened, spilling out its contents into a different time.

Tragic, or potentially-tragic stories involving parents and children hit me hard ever since I became a mother myself, as once did tragic stories involving young college-aged people when I was a young college-aged person.  For those hours when I carried around that story, I thought too much about how brutal it would be for a young child to lose her mother’s body, forevermore; to crave so instinctively the touch, the smells, the contours and sheer physical presence so representative of safety and emotional and physical rightness. How could a child comprehend a mother’s empty, or failing body?  See the tease of them there, so familiar, and yet so unreachable?  Or, worse yet, how tragic it would be to have a mother disappear altogether, whisked away in a flash, leaving behind a confused and primeval ache in her wake.

Then, yesterday, at a family birthday party for Scott’s niece, we found ourselves at a farm on a cold November afternoon.  L. was happily lost in a hay maze, and T. was in and out of the barn, waiting so eagerly for the chance to ride a pony.  I struck up a conversation with an interesting and vibrant woman, the kind of woman who makes you feel you’ve known her all your life when, in fact, you have only just met.  The wind whipped around us, horses blew out steam, the chickens scattered and regrouped, and her own daughter raced back and forth from mother to father and back again, content in the presence of both her parents; bookends, home bases, rightness embodied.

Well into conversation with this engaging person, I found out suddenly that this was the same woman from the terrible story–the one who only a few weeks ago had been in such a tenuous state. And here she was, in flesh and blood, on a windy slope, her curly hair waving around her face, and her daughter running crazy circles in the wind. I reached out to touch her arm when I found out, and felt just so amazed and happy that she was there, on the other side of it all, on a day probably just as ordinary as that other day, the one that was so terrible.

And by and by her daughter clamored to be held.  She bent and scooped her up with one fluid movement, so practiced and commonplace–I must do it with T. fifty times a day.  At once the little girl folded her body in close, her legs and arms settling just right into all the familiar places, her head leaning in against the curves of woman’s chest, the softness of her shirt, the body–her world–she had almost lost for good.

I thought to myself, how could anything seem more important ever again to that mother and child, there on that slope, in the wind, than all of that?