The summer came to an end a few days ago. Or so it seems. It is cold in early morning, and cold at night. It feels like late October mornings when dollops of hot breath snake out of your mouth and you feel the tip of your nose becoming a separate, cold entity.
Calendula orange suns are the only flowers that still ornate our lost little garden, the one that became so small and dry it required daily water support. Except that we were not here every day and thus the story of what could have been ended a while go with some sorry half-ripened tomatoes and leggy minuscule cucumbers that tried to embrace some oh-so-dry beans with their last drop of climbing energy.
But I will not dwell too much on that. The summer had its fruit in days of hot and silly times, it had swimming and traveling and waking up so late the sun was almost scolding us. It had starry nights and lying in the dry grass in the back yard waiting for a meteor shower that we barely saw but relished the experience so much that we thought it was a successful adventure. Are they not all like that though?
Yes they are. Boys grow and as they do, they make it so. We dance as they sing and no one knows which song comes next. Life happens. It did so all summer and now fall comes back like a stray dog we left behind last year. Hello September, here already? Of course you are.
But this year… Stop. We talk about school but our words have wings. The boys and their smiles are complete. We have stacks of books awaiting, we have stories to tell and write and we have a world to discover. And then another. Time will not stand still. Be it so, we make it sing with us.
Boys smile and snuggle in early morning, hikes to follow just before we start the day of school which this year we will call homeschool.
With gentle ties to online schools that will assist our flight, plus a forest adventure every week for little boy. Thus shall be our dance and time will have its say complementing our words rather than have us chase for better ones. Time is never enough, not with growing kids and life tumbles. Slow slow, so you can hear leaves whooshing in the wind and blades of grass grow…
Time with boys, growing boys that still have plenty of smiles and their growing trust. That we can have our school here, that we learn together and travel to places unknown. Day after day, this month and the next and all that will follow until the nest becomes too small for their wings, the boys will snuggle, ask for more, ask for less, laugh, scream loud enough for half the world to hear, hug and say ‘I’m sorry, never again’, and then it will happen again, because we never learn all there is to learn, but keep on trying… and I will see it all, I will see their footsteps tracing paths I never knew existed. It is so. Magic.
School, ours, with two boys and their smiles. To fly, infinitive. To make wings out of love and have them spread all the way over the horizon. ‘Tis so.