Simply happy

The girls and I were talking about this past summer, and we all agreed it was the best summer ever. Not just because of the trip to Yellowstone, although that was cool beyond words. And not just because we did tons of other interesting stuff. And not because I got a lot of work done, progress made on lots of projects (though not fiction writing, so much). We had relaxed down time, too. We played tetherball. The kids didn't go to camp. Madison started flute lessons and joined the tournament team at karate. The weather was great, no heat waves at all...I think it got about 90 only once or twice the whole summer. Madison even wrote a poem about "my summer vacation" our first day back to official school, which was Wednesday.

I think it was the best summer ever because we have slid into a groove. A nice groove. No more moving (not for the next 10 years, I hope!), no more settling in, no more figuring out of career paths, Ella can read, and Madison has thoroughly gotten over the jittery period of age 5-7-or-8 where you never knew whether she was going to try to read too much into something and it would send her over the edge. There was less developing and more enjoying. We didn't do school, but of course we did the Birthday of the Day and everyone read every day and the girls wrote in their summer journals and we did the brainy talk that we always do that is full of our lives anyway. I can't think of any way that the summer could have been improved, aside from, you know, the political situation in the world beyond our four walls, which doesn't touch the girls' lives anyway.

Of course, ex-Catholic that I am, I have a tendency to project ahead into the future, which slightly mars the warm glow of this summer with the fact that it is ending. Maybe...probably... I will someday look at the misery around me and long desperately for sometime BEFORE... I'll long for the Summer of 2009, when the girls were young and I was still actively their mother and they were happy, happy, happy... before hormones kicked in and then they went to college, off to their own lives, and before I lost my purpose AIIIEEEEE. Let's not do that.

I mostly succeed at banishing these thoughts and living in the moment, especially when the moment has them snuggled up in my bed with me watching an old episode of Columbo on the laptop. Or when we're on the couch and they're listening raptly to me reading the Penderwicks. Or when we're playing 2-against-1 at tetherball.

Someday they will be big enough to beat me at tetherball. But not yet.