a slippery season

When I was a girl, I lived in hot and humid South Florida. I spent a considerable amount of time lolling on one of the swings in the backyard, or draped on the couch belly up with a book, or perfecting acrobatic tricks on the furniture. In my memory the climate somehow facilitated this drooling, staring-into-space kind of open time, but I suspect it's an essential part of childhood that - if given the opportunity - most all kids naturally gravitate towards.

In the midst of one of those happily bored, heavy-limbed childhood stretches, I started to think about the meaning of now. What the heck is now? How can it ever be now, when the moment you think it - or even utter the word aloud - the moment has passed, and you are in the future now, which wait, stop! is already sliding into another future now! Somebody please put on the brakes! I couldn't slow time down to take stock of what now is like. Hmm. If I couldn't describe now, did it even exist?

I conducted all sorts of little kid phenomenological experiments in the quest of discovering now. I was driven; finitude freaked me out. My reality experiments included playing with blinking, trying to feel what it is like to be mid-step with my airborne foot between takeoff and landing, and seeing how quickly I could say the word NOW. If I whispered the magic word fast enough, I might just catch the experience before it slipped away. Basically, I was absorbed in the kinds of oddball behaviors grown ups observe children doing with bewilderment. What the heck was that kid up to? Little did they know, like many a small person before me, I was working on some major philosophical problems!

Nowadays I don't sweat the impossible present moment too much. When I am able to be with my kids in a homemade time kind of way, I sometimes glimpse the eternal now (that whole love is greater than death thing) and it is profoundly reassuring. They give me more now - when I am soft and open enough to receive it - than I could ever capture with my own grubby hands as a kid.

But there is something about the fall. The brilliance, the red and gold of it, made more extraordinary by our anticipation of its rapid passing into the bareness of winter. I do succumb occasionally to that grasping childhood feeling. I want to stoop and collect all the beautiful leaves I see on the sidewalk. Quick, before they turn brown and crunch, unnoticed, under our feet! But of course they will turn brown on my kitchen table too.

And my kids get bigger, and the patch of silvery hair on the side of my bangs grows, and elderly neighbors die. Soft and open, that's what I said, right? Peaceful before relentless time? Sure, no problem.

Today has been a beautiful day, perhaps more beautiful because it is slowly sliding past me. In an open-handed way, I offer you some images that speak a little to what this moment has held.

Halloween prep: Frances' mummy pants are nearly finished. In a rare moment of indulgence, Gabriel and I sprinkled the messy stuff all over black fabric this morning from which I will make his Glitter Dog costume (his concept).

When I consider the evidence, I feel certain that Quadir is the First Crush. Frances brought the picture in today to give to her friend, and I found her arranging those blocks in the kitchen before school. They read Frances 5 Lovey Quadir - though she ran out of letters for his name and eventually made a U out of a sideways C and the I out of a 1. The letters are surrounded by animals, all of them apparently full of symbolic power. I swear she has never seen anything on a public bathroom door or tree trunk reading So-and-So Loves So-and-So, at least not that I know of. All I can do is marvel at all the ways she expresses her love for this kid.

The last flower picking foray. Gabriel loves to use his scissors and so we hacked at marigolds and the pineapple sage's red flowering tops.

We made bread dough too, an activity that used to appeal on a basic baking level to Gabriel. Now that we use the stand mixer, which he associates with heavy machinery, it is a whole new kind of thrill. He stands on a chair and flips the button into locked position, and then makes insane throaty noises along with the machine. He becomes one with the motor.

Does it matter? All these little details? Tomorrow might be different. Frances and Quadir might fight, and Gabriel might not be interested in making bread. Perhaps blogging is like my hands reaching backward to touch all the little nows, one sliding into the next, that fill our days. I cannot resist brushing over them with my fingertips, like lightly running a bouncing stick along a picket fence. I loved you then, and then, and then. Tap tap tap. It's a gesture that seeks to honor the fleeting moment, and then - inhale, exhale! - let it go.