On A Summer Evening

"Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them." -Bob Dylan

^ Don't worry, Mom. I only leave them out in the grass like this when the weather is perfectly clear. At the first hint of rain, I tuck them up under the eaves, just like you used to do.

Tonight, I am washing the dinner dishes when I glance out my kitchen window and see them. In an instant, years - decades! - fly away and I find myself in two places at once.

* * * * * 

First of all, I am at my mom's home. My childhood home. On a lake in southeastern Michigan. It's a  summer evening and we are out on the back deck where my mom is serving dinner to my own daughters. 

This is one of the mountaintop moments of my mom's life as a grandma. She absolutely loves feeding my girls and proudly serves them happy, healthy, home-cooked picnic dinners. And despite all the disconnects and crossed wires that complicate my own relationship with my mom, this is one part I get right: I know that my role is to step back and let my mom run the show, deciding who would sit where, serving up their plates, keeping up a running dialog of happy chatter, and in all ways, making the most of every moment of our time at her house. 

On a summer evening like this, I sit in the midst of the happy chaos, munching my own ear of sweet corn, perhaps helping to mop up the occasional spilled glass of lemonade, but otherwise letting my mom orchestrate this moment as I look on from the comfort of one of her favorite green and white striped director's chairs.

* * * * * 

At the same time, I am at my house in Seattle, and my mom has come to visit me. She comes often when the girls are young, and always spend at least a week with us during her fifth-grade teacher summer vacations. I often joke that my mom really comes just to visit the girls and in some ways, that is true. Every waking moment of her days are spent playing with them, weaving her own imaginative ideas into their endless games, chasing them around the backyard, or exploring the gardens with them. 

On a summer evening like this, I stand at my kitchen window with my hands in the soapy suds and watch them in the backyard, dashing here and there around the grassy lawn, with our rock wall in the background and flowers towering overhead. And I marvel at the playful, lighthearted spirit my mom has found as a grandmother. This is my mom at her best. 

* * * * *

Tonight, on a summer evening many years later, my hands swish a dish through the warm water as my eyes settle upon my mom's favorite green and white striped director's chairs, now nestled against the rock wall and flower bed in my quiet backyard, and those two lovely but entirely separate memories merge into one.

On this summer evening, I feel a tremendous surge of nostalgia, and an ache in my throat for all seasons of life that have gone whistling by, much faster than we can ever expect. And I feel my mother's presence very close indeed.