Where We Are Right Now

We’re renting a house on the street where I grew up. My body knew the turns before my mind caught up — the particular curve past our old house and each of the houses that I can name by the families that once lived there. I could be five. I could be twelve, sixteen, racing my green 3 speed toward the beach, the high school or any one of my friend’s houses.

Instead, this time, I am the mother. I am the matriarch of this household, however temporary, the one everyone looks to for the next chore, the next errand, the next thing that needs doing before Saturday.

There’s a particular vertigo in that — being every age you’ve ever been on a street, while also being the adult everyone is looking to for answers and direction.

The house has been a big, happy chaos for days. Packages arrive faster than we can open them. Beach towels are drying on every railing we have. Runs to the grocery store where I totated fruit as a teenager, buying lemons and more salad greens like it’s the most ordinary errand in the world, when it is anything but.

My sisters have come bearing wine and homemade cookies, scones and flowers, the way sisters do when they know words won’t be enough. Phones buzz constantly. Cars pull in and out. And then, every so often, the church bell rings in town or a stretch of morning silence before the house wakes invites me to pause — and I find myself standing very still in it, trying to make time behave, trying to hold the day open a little longer than it wants to be held.

It doesn’t listen. It never does.

The best part of these days has been the ocean.

Hannah and I have swum together the last few days, and she goes under the waves looking so joyful, so entirely unburdened, that you’d never guess — but I know. I know because I feel it too, that same flutter just beneath the surface of things. The water doesn’t ask us to explain it. It just holds us, cold and constant, and lets us come out the other side a little more collected than we went in. I don’t know what we’d do without it this week.

In a few days, this will all be memory instead of anticipation. That’s the strange trade life keeps making with us — the excitement of what’s coming turns, almost overnight, into the exhale of what happened. Both are real. Both are, in their own way, kind. And still we so rarely let ourselves stay in either one — we rush the anticipating to get to the doing, and then rush past the doing, already grieving it before it’s even over.

So this is me, trying not to do that. Trying to actually be here, on this street, in this body that remembers being young here, watching my daughter dive into the same water I dived into fifty summers ago as a young child, days before she becomes someone’s wife.

This is where the magic actually lives — not in the remembering, not in the anticipating, but in the strange, humid, bell-interrupted middle we’re standing in right now.

Here we go.