remodeling this life

I had been enjoying summer at the cottage for about a week, making the trip up and down the hill between the two cottages ten to twenty times a day. Each time reminded how flat Florida is and grumbling about how old and unfit I have become. Always eager to get from here to there or there to here, in a hurry to get where I was going to do what I needed to do – put towels in the dryer, fix meals, empty my arms of whatever I was carrying, or just to get there and do nothing.

This is who I am. I hurry from place to place, loving that my long stride gets me there sooner. Let’s get where we’re going and do what we were doing. Anyone with kids knows this isn’t how it works for them. They walk slowly when you want them to hurry and run around when you want them to sit down.

On this particular day, my daughter was making the trip up the hill with me. I was carrying our clothes, we were both still dripping from our chilly swim and I was hurrying to get there and get a bath started for her and put some clothes on myself.

She said, “Can we pick raspberries?”

Seeming to me a very ridiculous question, I answered with a little too much annoyance in my voice, “What raspberries? Where would we pick raspberries?”

She simply pointed and said “Those! Right there!”

There, right along the driveway, on the same path I’d hiked up and down about 100 times in the previous days, were wild raspberries – thousands of them ripe from the summer rain, begging to be picked. I hadn’t seen them.

I slowed my step to look at them and to see my 5 year old’s eyes full of excitement and anticipation. Would I say yes? Would she be allowed to fill cups with them, eating them along the way?

“Let’s set our things down, change into dry clothes. Then we’ll come back outside and pick some.”

She sprinted inside to put her clothes on.

All through my son’s nap that day, we filled our fingers, hands, cups with delicious from the vine raspberries. Minutes of silence as we picked would go by. Sometimes we’d call out to the other, “Look, there are more over there!” and make our way up the hill, across the path to the other side picking as many as we could.

As I pulled the fruit that day, I remembered back to when I was growing up in suburbia. My best friend lived across the street from me and we spent endless hours together each day – meeting first thing in the morning to walk to the bus stop together, walking home together after school, playing until our parents said it was time for dinner. Jesse was a calm, smart and deliberate girl at the age of 5. She wasn’t impulsive, she cleaned her room, did well at school and practiced the piano. She was all the things I wasn’t.

In those days, I would leave my house in the morning, walk across the street and knock on Jesse’s door and then wait for her to come out so we could make the trek through her yard, across to the neighbor’s yard and cut through their driveway to get to the other side of the neighborhood where our bus would come. In the summer, the raspberries in her back yard were abundant. She’d slow then come to a  stop each morning to pick some. I stood idly by, bored. I just wanted to get there. I wanted to hurry up and wait at the bus stop, for no other reason than the bus stop was my destination. Why linger along the way?

That day with my daughter, all of this came back to me. I realized that for always I have been hurried – by no one but me and for no reason in particular. I thought of how I’d missed out on picking and tasting those berries with my best friend all those years before. I wondered how many other things I’ve missed along the way simply because I am too intent on the destination to see the beauty along the path I’m on.

I sat in that patch of berries with my daughter, grateful to her for showing me now the things I missed when I was 5 and opening my eyes to what else may come along.

The next morning she sat quietly at the kitchen island, groggy and bed-headed.  I made her usual morning smoothie, and she watched bored.  Her eyes lit up when I threw in some of the raspberries we picked the day before. She watched the fruit, yogurt and juice spin together to make a deep dark pink, different than the pale pink she was used to. Stopping and enjoying what’s along the path had changed things for both of us.

Last night was chilly, and the cool air lingered through to this morning.

We spent yesterday in the Adirondacks. We made a 2 hour drive that in the 21 years that I lived in NY, I had never made before. Probably because this cottage escape was enough we didn’t need to go there to find a slice of outdoor life. It was beautiful there yesterday and I enjoyed going and now being able to say I’ve been.

We arrived back at the cottage and within minutes the kids wanted to swim. They love the water, that out the door the lake invites them to play for as long as their little bodies can take. I did my daily lap swim with a 30 pound boy on my back. The first form of exercise I’ve ever discovered that is fun. The rain started to fall, redundantly wetting our heads as our limbs moved. I remembered being a kid and loving when the rain would fall because having the lake to jump into made those raindrops irrelevant.

We went  inside and warmed up in our sweats and fleeces, feeling the chill of the night air settling in.  We spent the last moments of the day playing a board game, then taking our yawning selves to our warm beds. We could have done more, gone more, needed more, but instead we just loved what we had, who we were with and where we were.

Finally, tucked into our beds, the evening routine of saying silly things to each other began. Anything to make them giggle and be a little less nervous of the disappearing light. Falling asleep with a lingering grin on my face, I felt that everything right there and then was enough.

The water on the lake is still. The leaves begin to waken, fluttering good morning. The sun shines through the trees making the green look yellow. It’s quiet.

So many memories of this place are from when I was a child. I was the one sleeping in, waking up hours after the sun peeked hello. Giving my parents time to sip their coffee on the porch in peace. Now I am the one embracing the quiet of a new day with my coffee and a pen.

My kids are the ones stomping down the stairs with bedhead and sleepy grins. They spend the long days in their swimsuits, afternoons eating popsicles, looking for bugs, and slamming the same screen door I slammed a hundred times a day when I was 5. The loud thud of that old wood screen door is a comfortable and familiar sound of life at the cottage.

The days are so much the same as they were then. My kids are now the ones playing with reckless abandon while I try not to worry and just let them be. I still put on my swimsuit and dive in to splash and play. I will know I’ve started to take myself too seriously when I won’t get my hair wet.

The afternoons slide by, sometimes with naps on the porch other times with paint and swimming, reading books or hiking in the woods. Sometimes we even watch tv. Whatever it is, it’s always good because it’s here. The days are long, the moments fleeting. I’m here with my parents just as I was 28 years ago. They watched me and my brother jump off the same dock all day long. Now they watch me with my own kids. Making the same memories. Savoring the same slice of serenity. So much the same in this place where little ever changes.

I embrace change – the visible progress that remodeling brings. The excitement of a move, a new house, changes in me. But sometimes, at a place like this I am reminded how gorgeous sameness can be.

Added to Tuesdays Unwrapped at Chatting at the Sky