In this sudden turn of time…

When I arrived back in North England last night, after a week’s stay in southern North Carolina, it felt like autumn, already: cooler, quieter, darker, calmer.

As I ran errands today and ducked in and out of shops, signs of a new season were everywhere.  Apple-spice scented candles.  Bags of candy corn.  Orange and black cards shouting a holiday “Boo!”  A stack of assorted books on Christopher Columbus.  Pumpkin pie filling.  Banners boasting from store windows, “New fall fashion is here!”  At Target, I saw a woman standing before a rack of Halloween costumes, eagerly sifting through the full, early selection and holding choices up to her young twin daughters.

No wonder we struggle to stay present, when we are constantly propelled into the future, into next season when one hasn’t even finished.

The return from my family’s annual vacation has always marked the end of summer for me, though, largely because my sisters and I always trucked right off to school shortly after we arrived home to Stoneyway, still bearing our tans and beach-blond hair proudly, still loose-limbed and smooth-skinned from days and days of walking the sands of Topsail.  Although I haven’t been on a student’s schedule in almost 10 years—graduate school doesn’t count, considering I attended part-time—it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve stood, post-vacation, at my Boston apartment doorsteps and set down my bags and felt the enduring heat and damp heaviness of summer and realized, grimly, that I had many more weeks to go until a new chapter of the year would begin.

And so this sudden turn of time, this quick spat of cool, dry air, this hint of what’s to come, was a welcome surprise.  I returned to Marblehead and remembered that one season has peaked and crested and will soon fall, and fall, softly, slowly, unpredictably, like leaves, like a child at play in a pile of their color.

And it is fitting, too.  Because change is indeed afoot.

At the beach this year, we had three active, adorable, wholly individual and astounding children, who absolutely amazed me with their sweetness, their innocence, their ability to see and understand much more than I give them credit for, much more than I saw or understood at their ages.  During our stay in Topsail, I watched my sister’s boys play independently, then snuggle close on the couch, squabble and quickly forgive, comfort one another, laugh with one another, share inside jokes, tell secrets, swap food, follow, lead, listen, and stay close.  Always so very close.  Without me knowing when or where or how exactly it happened, they are true brothers now, at ages six and (nearly) four.  Brothers—a foreign but fascinating development in our family of women.

And my family—this year, unlike several other vacations before, we approached every day in a unified yet undiscussed decision to relax, move slowly, not over do it, enjoy, go easy, let mornings unfold gently and without agenda, let fights die before they began, let the sea carry it, all of it, far from shore.  Games, walks, sandcastles, books and music, homemade breakfasts, puzzles, platters of cheeses and grapes and ripe Pennsylvania peaches, sangria and spritzers and several heavy pours too many, and mothers, aunts, fathers, children, loud and falling underfoot, as thunderclouds rolled in over the Atlantic, as we sat back on our high, white deck chairs, the ice in our glasses melted, the porch railings wetting with rain and sea spray.  We knew then, if only for a moment or two, that this—all of this—is precious, is only ours, is us, from years past, and for years ahead.

Because, in the next moment, it is another season, another summer.

I feel as though I am embarking on the next moment, too.

Here in my Marblehead apartment especially.

Today, I decided, resolutely, as I unpacked and rearranged, that this apartment will be nothing but a laugh for me.  It’s more than 200-years old.  Literally.  The floors dip and sway nearly as much as the ocean I just left.  The doors cut at odd, mismatched angles.  Dust accumulates pretty much as soon as I wipe it away.  Nail holes scatter across every single wall like black polka-dot wallpaper.  Except, of course, in my bathroom, which is outfitted in a wildly bright and chaotic wallpaper pattern that I imagine died a quick death on every other wall but mine and perhaps the sunroom of a wilting Floridian bungalow.  And except in my dining room, where the faded, floral wallpaper conveniently hides the nails and inconveniently dates back to the 1970s.  When I asked my landlord about taking it down, considering, well, it’s already coming down in one corner, she gasped, and said, “Absolutely not. It’s beautiful. It stays.”

As does the wildlife, it seems.  The number of spiders crawling around outside—and, I cringe saying it, inside—my four walls is such a daunting figure that I’m beginning to think this place might finally cure me of my debilitating (and ridiculous) arachnophobia.  I pulled out my vacuum cleaner five times today to suck five horrible creepy-crawlers off my walls—after, I admit, alternating between standing frozen in one spot staring at the damn things and running to grab first paper towels, then a shoe, then a book, then a broom, and then finally the Dyson, assured to do the job cleanly and thoroughly.  My neighbor probably thinks I have a compulsive cleaning disorder rather than a paralyzing (and ridiculous) fear of Charlotte and her brood.

Yes, in the next moments to come, I think I will laugh quite a bit here in my Marblehead apartment.  In which I also keep finding interesting and eerie remnants of past lives:  a crinkled ziploc bag full of yellow tacks; a batch of wire hangers; an Indianapolis Colts magnet (traitors…); a box of graying baking soda, dated 2005, and long done deodorizing the cabinetry; three small, wooden boxes, none of which I can open; a sturdy brass-based lamp that, actually, I rather like and have adopted and is now lighting my living room; and, finally, a photograph, encased in glass and tucked into the highest back corner of my built-in bookshelves, of a thin, tanned woman, wearing 80s-style, over-sized sunglasses and a wide smile, sitting timidly on the bow of a sailboat, waving.  Good-bye?  Or hello.  It is a laugh, either way, because it is all a part of this strange, funny old house I’m now living in.

And the other next moments, the changes ahead: a new job search, a new schedule of helping with Grace, a new membership at a new yoga studio.  New writing, new books.  New babies born, and next birthdays celebrated.  A few new trips, domestic and abroad.

And, hopefully, new dates to plan and look forward to, new love to give and to take in, new chances for bravery, for brandishing the fear of what won’t happen and blazing toward the answer of, “What will happen if I try?”

A new season.

Not yet, I know.  But, soon.

So soon that today, on a whim, I bought one of those apple-spice scented candles, and I burned it, atop the side table in my sloped living room, now adorned with my freshly dusted and cleaned furniture, and my volumes of poetry and my mother’s paintings, all freed from storage, all alit in the golden, late afternoon light.

I burned it while I sorted through stacks of books.  I burned it while I drank a glass of wine and read our letters, your words, a time ago, in that life.

It burned, and smelled sweetly of what I remembered best, what I loved from season’s before.

The breeze blowing off the sound, blowing through the narrow, empty sidestreets of Marblehead, whistled as it reached my windows, rustled the crushed-silk curtains that my mother sewed for me years ago, that I have hung here, in this moment of time, and brought with it the tantalizingly scent, and promise, of what’s to come.

I know it’s summer when…

…I find sand in the bottom of my purse, on the floor of my car, caked to the soles of my flipflops, woven among the bristles in my hairbrush, and even in the small crook of my ear.

…the ice cream truck shows up more often than a Coke commercial during the Olympics.

…the days lay themselves out long and unbridled, and from sun up until sun down, I can hardly track the hours, because everything is warm and bright and green, everything is tinged yellow with sun, everyone strolls leisurely, slowly, sandals clacking against the sidewalk, hatted heads dipping under heavy tree boughs.

…freckles dot my nose and shoulders like giggles: light, pretty, misshapen and haphazard and happy.

…I feel the warmth of flirtation blush my cheeks, spread slowly down my throat to my collarbone, as we lean in, and in, and soon my whole body flushes, and goodness, wouldn’t a cool, tall glass of water taste nice?

…the pile of missed calls and unreplied e-mails grows and grows, thanks to vacations and flex days and jumbled schedules and “out of office” responses.  You know it is summer when it’s so frighteningly easy to fall “out of touch” for a spell.

…references to the annual family vacation seep into every conversation, because the countdown to Topsail has begun, and the to-do lists and grocery lists and packing lists are in draft form, and plane tickets need to be purchased, and beach games need to be bought for the boys, and new suits, and a new bocce set, and beer, plenty of beer, and August always remains endlessly, painfully far away.

…it is completely rationale—and encouraged!—to enjoy a bloody mary (or two…) with a late lunch on a Sunday, while sitting in the sun, while feeling a bit on vacation solely because it is hot, and we’re wearing strapless dresses and expensive sunglasses and colorful jewelry, and we’re talking not of work and stress but of love and life and all that we want, as the hours pass, our phones ignored, boats clicking against one another in the harbor, seagulls soaring overhead, in search, too.

…aloe vera becomes a mainstay among the daily toiletry routine.

…pedicures are factored in as part of the monthly budget.

…the stack of books I’ve saved throughout the year suddenly, finally, starts shrinking just a bit, thanks to long hours spent in chairs, in the cool shade of a quiet, June evening.

I know it is summer when I can think back across the first half of the year, and I can see marked progress throughout the months.  I can see how much further I already am, now, than I was in February, or even April.

It is always summer when I am reminded of how the year began—and all my hopes and best intentions for it.  And for me.

This summer, I am living in a beach town; I own a beach pass, and I keep a chair and a towel stowed in my backseat at all times.  I am doing a triathlon.  I am moving into my own apartment again.  I am insanely in love with my niece, my family, my small circle of dearest friends.  I am acutely aware of how much my life has changed since the last time I saw the early days of July.

I am happy.

And I know it’s summer, fully, because my happiness can’t be bottled with the fireflies, can’t be captured in fireworks or campfire songs.  Rather, it is lived in the long, busy days I spend in this old, beautiful seaside town, in the arms of loved ones, in the company of laughter, with our backdrop of sailboats and sun-honeyed skin and the solace of knowing:

I am right where I should be, this summer.

On being an aunt.

Six years in the making, and I finally understand what an aunt can be in a child’s life.  Or, at least, in the lives of the children who call me auntie or some such garbled variation.  And there are many such children.

I have two nephews, one niece, and three dear friends’ babies who I claim a little bit as my own flesh and blood, too, because each of those friends are like sisters to me anyway, and I am quite certain I will watch their little boys and girls get bigger, get baptized, blow out candles, run across the beach, and then graduate, and then grow up altogether.  Just as we once did.

As each of these sweet souls came into my life, so did these odd feelings of excitement, worry, fear, hope, sadness, and supreme happiness.  The combination of these emotions was, I assure you, confusing enough.  Factor in trying to interact with new mothers and fathers who are suffering sleep deprivation, hormonal upheaval, roller coaster highs and rock-bottom lows and, well.  It’s no wonder it took me six years to adjust and to appreciate, finally, the incredible role I have to play in these young lives.

This past weekend, my eldest sister came all the way from Pennsylvania to visit, carrying in tow her husband and her two sons, ages six and almost-four.  These boys—they were my introduction to children; I was just 25 when the first arrived.  I got the call when I was at happy hour in Washington, DC, and I’ll never forget running outside, onto K Street, into a warm, humid May evening so I could hear my father yell the news of Jack’s birth from the hospital waiting room, and then heading back inside to order another round. I drove home two days later to hold Jack for the first time.  Less than three years passed before I made the same drive north to hold his brother, Sam, just three days old.  They have grown into sweet, tender children: sensitive, warm, curious, brave, funny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and achingly sincere.

Grace, newly obsessed with her cousins, spent the Memorial Day weekend tottering after them, calling their names in an ecstatic squeal.

I spent the weekend observing them all.  And thinking about this special place I inhabit in their lives.

I thought about how I want my nephews to remember the days when they asked me to draw “tracks” in the sand, when they shrieked in delight at six-inch high waves and begged me to hold their hands as they braved them, when they knew only snack time and bed time and everything in between was play time, when they lived like kings of the long, late, sun-dappled afternoons, wooden swords safely in hand.  I want them to remember how they tucked tight in my lap, how they sat with their legs splayed, how badly they wanted to be big and how badly we wanted them to stay small.  I want them to remember rolling in the backyard grass, climbing the sea-sprayed rocks of Prescott Beach, throwing pebbles across the low, shallow tide alongside Fort Sewall, and asking all the while if I was watching, listening, did I want to come play, too?

I want them to remember; but I know it is I who will keep this chronicle for them, as a dutiful aunt will do.

I want my niece to remember when she called me “da da” and pinched the back of my arm and clung to the drape of my shirt as I carried her home.  I want her to remember when we chased the sun across the sand in the mid-morning hours of high tide.  I want her to remember making coffee, dancing in the car, pointing out cars and trees and boats and signs.  I want her to remember me and her this young, living together, awaking to and parting with each day under the same roof.

I want us all to remember the sounds of the full, busy house: endless showers, slamming doors, laundry ever-churning, scuffed carpets, a scared cat scrambling around underfoot, sprinklers spraying on, the clap of the grill lid closing, the slap against a mosquito, the clank of ice collapsing in yet another half-drunk wine spritzer, children netting fireflies and the last light of day, while we sisters sit and marvel and love and wonder: did we live like this once, too?

I think I remember us then, in our Stoneyway childhood.

On weekends such as this, my sisters lives, full of children and households and husbands, flutter up and around me, like a swarm of graying dandelion ends:  hopeful and old and afloat on the breeze, uncertain of exact direction but buoyed by the promise of arrival, somewhere, sometime, in some other day’s twilight.

It has always been this way: me chasing them, fascinated by their dance across the days, oh so curious to see where we’re headed.  I want so desperately to know my place—and our conclusion.  Maybe that is the struggle I will wrestle all my life.

Maybe that is the role of the aunt, too.  Playing along but not necessarily leading the way.

I recognize the wonder and beauty and amazement of a weekend such as this: sisters, children, fathers, beach mornings, napped afternoons, slow walks to town, sun-reddened skin, strawberry-stained mouths, and a thirst for summer, now, bright, blazing, bring it on with the surf and sand and ocean spray.

I see the fragile innocence of family.

These are precious, young years.  This is time to savor.

As an aunt, I understand this.  Because I am witnessing these children in ways even their parents can’t:  I see their perfection (and their flaws) through a loving and devoted but distanced lens.  I can nurture and scold and teach and play—but the time is finite.  Every last minute counts, because at day’s end, that child isn’t mine.  I give him or her over.  But, I do so knowing I have loved every last inch of that little boy or girl, eyebrows to toes.  What else, as an auntie, am I to do?

In some quiet moments, though, when the children need tended and I, the childless one, am left to enjoy my drink or my book alone, I catch myself wondering when, or if, I will be the mother someday, instead of the aunt.  Sometimes, pangs of sadness push me nearly to the brink of tears, because I fear that “when” won’t come.  Other times, I almost laugh at the absurdity of such a fear.  If I am meant to do anything in this life of mine, it is to love and raise a child.  Of that, I am sure.

And, until then, being the auntie who can buy frivolously expensive clothing and sticker books and bags of Starbursts, who can show a little more leniency than the disciplinarian parents, who is silly and child-like, too, who can’t seem to tire of knock-knock jokes, or stories about school, or playing Legos, or making the grass and sky and trees any color I please across dozens of coloring book pages, who loves earnestly, who is so proud, who will remember all the early years—yes, being that auntie is just fine with me.

Someday, I will tell them all about who they were then.  I will tell them their stories.

I will say to Grace how, one Saturday evening, as her mother and I carried her off the beach and began heading home, the sun warming our shoulders and the boys calling our names as they ran to catch up to us, as she whimpered, sad to see the day’s end, her mother whispered, into the pink ear of her daughter, “It’s alright, sweetheart.  We get to do this all over again tomorrow.”

They were precious, young years indeed.

Semantics: Keep it simple.

I only stopped by to ask about sub-letting my apartment for a year.

An hour later, I left my landlord’s apartment—which, conveniently, is literally right next door to mine—with the beginnings of tears in my eyes and a heart pounding so hard that I needed to sit down as soon as I had locked the front door behind me.

Although I am writer and a lover of language, I know that words really are just words.  We are the ones who give them weight and depth and significance.  We apply our own experience to them.  We supply the many possible meanings within what was said.

So when my landlord looked at me across her dim, lace-lined living room, and said, “Go!  Take this opportunity!  You have just one life—live it, fully, without regret. Keep an open heart, and good things will come your way.”

Well.  I took those beautiful, wonderful words and gathered them so close, held them so tightly, and thought, “Yes—this is just what I needed to hear.”

It’s not as though I am lacking in encouragement in regards to my move to London.  If anything, and to my great surprise, I am receiving nods and pats of approval each and every way I look.  I keep waiting for the gavel to fall, for someone—anyone!—to tell me “no” or to say, “You can’t,” or to give a firm shake of head and snap, “That just won’t be possible.”

But, for every question I have, I get positive answers.  For each minute I spend lost in the foggy, overwhelming, logistical maze of moving my U.S. life to the U.K., I discover yet another person pointing me in the right (or, at least, better) direction.  For every doubt I pose, someone is there to reassure me.  (Turns out “paperwork” solves most everything.)  Check marks and “okay” and details on next steps have begun littering my page of planning and to do’s.

Even my family is now mapping out when they’ll come to visit.  Just today, my sister quoted me London hotel rates for December.

So…this is really happening?  And you’re all in support?!

Yes.

For once, it is that simple.

Who would have thought.

I always put great significance on seemingly little quotes and snippets of phrase.  ”We don’t talk for weeks.”  ”I saw blood and a bit of it was mine.”  ”These, our changing years.”   “Don’t forget me.”   “Breathe—let go.”  ”Strong, brave, true.”   “I like you.”  They’re just words.  Collections of crisp consonants and slurred-together syllables.

But, the meaning—oh, the many meanings!

Although I know I will write the hell out of this move and all it means throughout the months ahead, I love that right now, in this moment, as I dangle my legs over the ledge of this enormous valley of “what if’s,” I can capture this great and life-altering decision to leave my beloved Boston and move to another continent in this rather basic and yet awesomely brave piece of advice from the old and slightly crazy woman who collects my hard-earned rent money each month:

“You have just one life—live it, fully, without regret. Keep an open heart, and good things will come your way.”

And, for once, I am letting it remain that simple.

London, I loved you.

London—

It was the loud, busy, chaotic Strand.  It was three hours in the National Portrait Gallery.  It was waiting in line for Westminster Abby.  It was sitting, silently, in a pew at St. Catherine’s.  It was Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and St. James Garden, in the rain, huddled beneath my umbrella, hoping for a spell dry enough to snap a picture.

London led me down narrow, cluttered side streets, and then onto lovely lantern-lit lanes, and then through a narrow alleyway of stores dedicated to selling used, antique, and first-edition copies of books.  In London, I found “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” browned and torn-edged and signed by Dylan Thomas himself, in New York, in 1950, and I nearly wept when I realized the price: 1,500 pounds, and not a penny less.

London was leaning across the tabletop at an old friend’s now-favorite neighborhood gastro-pub, as we swapped stories from the last 10 years, as we reminisced, and laughed, and gossiped, and remembered, as we recounted how we got to where we are right now, that night, the two of us:  strong, ambitious, eager women, bright-eyed, ready to eat up all life has to offer. 

Throughout London, I heard more accents than I’ve ever encountered.  And still—still!—the British, with their “cheers” and “loves” and hilarious fluctuations in tone and tenor, won my heart.

London, I realized, as I crossed the Waterloo bridge that one night, the Thames churning beneath me, the skyline blazing and bright, had nothing, nothing at all, to do with you.  And I realized this with a sigh, a sadness, a slight resignation, because in a way, in a small way, I wish it did. 

London offered up miles of city streets to explore—I canvassed all I could; I did my best.  I bear blisters as proof.

London was an evening spent at a small table at a small, quintessential English pub, drinking a honey porter hailing from Sussex, eating a steak and mushroom pie, with chips, of course, and watching the men gulp Guinness at the bar and listening to the ladies’ chirps and giggles, and thinking, “I should write this all down, right now, before I forget.”

In London, my voice rang clear, composed, confident.  London unearthed a radiance within me.  I did well, and I was proud.

London was me, and I was London, and we were a perfect fit, a right pair, for at least a few days, a few nights, which is all a true love affair ever really affords.  We are left with pictures, perhaps, but mostly just memories, imprints, bruises from our haste, our ecstasy.

I came to Copenhagen giddy, well-loved by my London tryst.

And Denmark met me with a cold and steely stare, a hard shoulder, a grim and desolate sky.

I admit, I am tired and travel-weary.  Another longing holds me back. 

But, I promise, I will do my best to warm things up between us.  For we have many days, together, ahead.