I haven't written all summer.
With my more usual pen and paper, scribbled from exhausted hands and overfull heart, nor here (as you well know.)
It’s been a summer.
That phrasing tells us what we feel in the air. Summer is ending. It hasn’t yet, but I’m not such a verb-tense-ninja to know how to succinctly phrase the “it’s yet been a summer that’s not yet ended but has passed by.” So here we are.
How did it pass…is passing?
With 25 chicks for awhile and 4x weekly new activities for the kids. With more katydids than last year and perhaps the same count of fireflies. With bodies in recovery and stamina newly found. With griddle cakes many Friday Night Family Nights made by our eldest. With much less canning and freezing and drying than last year, so far, as I spend that time working on another’s farm to gain in knowledge, skill, and motivation.
So it’s September and I think our third fall of “do the leaves always start to fall this early? This seems early.” Our fourth year of farm-shopping and we’re in another spell of “maybe now, let’s check the market.”
And it brings up the talks. The talks of what we’re creating for our children, for ourselves, for the future of the four human lives we have responsibility for now. For the countless beings we live alongside, gently or not.
And these considerations bring more to the surface. More about what was “ok” that we took as “ok” because it was foisted upon us. The story we told about the things that happened. The story saying things were “ok.” Now seeing that stories can be different, were different, must be different.
My parents moved to a farm, of sorts, when I was as old as our youngest. My brother as old as our oldest. It was glorious. For a time. It was also isolating and depressing. Often. Most often after we moved back there for my high school years. As with many things now, there is clarity that comes from my stories about my childhood when I see it through the lens of these two little loves of ours. What was, needn’t have been. Expectations were off. Far off. Days away from the mapped path of “ok.”
It can be ok to move now. To change their worlds to include wood and meadow, space and observation. Because we know how to bridge those distances. We are willing to take them away from the woods: to friends’ houses, to library events, to where their hearts desire belonging and connection outside of our home. We will go. And we will go as gladly as we can muster.
Because isolation can be created by choice. And we can choose differently.