It's been a long summer of contrasts, weeks where it rains like a judgement, weeks where the heat clings and drags us down. I have course work, jobs around the house, the allotment that I'm doing. I swim in the river occasionally, write at my desk that has remained clear so far.
The kids are on their own schedules, moving late and without urgency. Only my eldest is working at his internship. I wake with him and watch him sort his own routine. He's often back home before the others really surface. Their father says he'll take them, but rarely does, so we're just occupying ourselves. I still have a couple of weeks before I go back to work and am just meandering through the days.
I'm working on a few poems for submissions: a couple of anthologies for groups I'm in. I have joined a few free writing sessions where we sit on a silent Zoom call for an hour to write together. It's weird but effective. It's an anchor within the current of the summer and I usually write something. I still go on Sundays to the café to write.
I've started having dreams about school. The first one was a sort of nightmare, I woke at 6am in a panic that I had missed orientation and didn't know what I should be doing in my new/old role. Last night's was quieter, but still with that sense of anxiety. I was there with other teachers and couldn't type some information on my phone with my awkward thumbs.
My technology dreams are always a sure sign of stress. I've had them my whole life, from not being able to dial old rotary phones to emails going awry on computers to struggling to find info on smart phones. Always with a sense of inadequacy. Something simple I should be able to do but just can't.
There is this edge of my awareness that time is slipping by, that I should make more of the long days. My computer sends me 'On this day' collections of my photos over the years, reminding me when I had to keep the kids busy with visits to museums, parks, zoos and the beach.
I kind of miss filling our days with fun, forced or otherwise, but also none of us want to dive into that effort, that heat, dealing with other people. We tried camping once earlier this summer and the site was overrun with people camping for a party and I left in a strop rather than be kept awake all night again.
School will start up and I know there will be a flicker of regret for not doing more, on my own or with the kids. Friends will talk of holidays and camping, days on the beach, share photos of adventures and we've had another slow summer at home. Which I know isn't a bad thing, but the world tells us to hurry up, to do more, to seize the day and make the most of each moment, to document it and share it.
So here it is.
Fireflies don't flicker or rush, they just float about, appearing and then going dark again, moving to their own urgency that we don't understand. And the summers seemed to last forever, lulls and sparks of excitement clumsily mixed together until we were ready to go back to the ordered world.
There's a poem in there.
