Today is the last day of my holidays and I'm still in my jammies, writing with tea, playing solitaire until my head quiets. I'm blessed with a teacher's holidays in Finland, nine weeks and I have to admit I've done very little. I'll probably feel guilty when I go back to the staff room tomorrow and colleagues ask me what my kids and I did over the break, but there's no changing anything now.
I was selfish and needed to do nothing, couldn't really afford big trips, but didn't even make small ones around the area as I always plan to. Take a boat to Tallinn or Stockholm or go to Turku where I've never been. We didn't even go camping. We stayed at home, visited a couple of beaches, went to a few museums. They spent time with friends who were still around.
Yesterday though, we went to one of the few places in Finland I feel at ease. Just a river and a lake it feeds into. Neither very spectacular or busy, no cafe nearby for ice cream. Just an outhouse toilet and a changing room at the sauna. We can't light fires, nothing interesting, but I didn't even have to fight the kids to get them there. Ususally there's the back lash at turning off the screens, breaking the lack of routine. But they have good memories of the place as well, so we willing to just pack up and go.
My daughter took her portable paint kit, I took my notebook. We took snacks and lots of towels. The car doesn't have air conditioning, so the windows were open the whole trip. We arrived windblown and sweaty, but everyone was smiling within minutes. The kids forgot whatever niggles they have with each other and threw themselves into the river, talked about music, painted and splashed. We went too late and the sun rolled behind the trees, but we jumped off the diving board and stayed long enough. It's what I needed to finish the summer.
Today I'm doing laundry and charging my school laptop, chasing up last emails. The kids are back on their devices though I woke them that bit earlier in preparation for next week. I'm sure they'll feel jealous of their friends trips abroad, but I hope they remember the days where we splashed in the woods, ate ice cream, saw snakes and tortoises, cooked sausages and realise it wasn't such a bad summer.
Diving off that board into the lake is a reoccurring image in my poems, like watching the barnacle geese leave in autumn or the first anemones that appear in the forest. I write about them over and over in different variations, trying to capture something that can't quite be put in words. Moments that mean more than just the passing of the seasons, though they carry that weight as well, the years sliding by much too fast.
Stepping off that creaking board with no glasses and a fear of heights always feels momentous. I don't really like swimming. I feel wobbly and uncertain high above the deep, black water, but desperately want to jump in. Water that changes around me, cold to cool to warm, golden to green to clear as I surface. Water that changes me somehow, every summer. So I keep going back, revisiting it in poems and pictures, expecting nothing new, but finding it as I step off that edge and resurface.
I enjoy my job and will get back into the swing of things soon enough, but now I don't want summer to end.
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