Grey and Gold by John Rogers Cox

1942

Cleveland Museum of Art

  It is high summer.  It comes every year right about this time.  Long hot muggy midwestern days, dark thunderheads loom on the horizon, rolling in during the late afternoon; creating a perfect backdrop for endless rows of cornstalks beginning to golden up for autumn.

  For the past fifteen years this time has been a period of waiting.  Waiting for a new year; the school year to begin again for my children.  But this year it is different.  For the first time both of my daughters will be in college away from home.  It is a new incarnation of herself for the younger; a fresh reunion with friends for the older; a time to reconnect with a college community that is for such a short but exhilarating duration in our lives.  For it is at college that we often discover our course and if we are lucky find the passion that will drive our life’s work.

  School begins much earlier now than it did when I was a student.  I remember spending these days picking buckets of wild blackberries at the farm where I kept my horse; long bareback rides (the horse, not me) through endless fields of rustling corn stalks, birds flying up in front of my horse’s plodding hooves, the sun bright and hot in the western sky.  These days before Labor Day represented my last days of freedom; lying in the grass making pictures out of the clouds or waiting throughout the long baking afternoon;  until fireflies appeared in the tall grass at twilight. 

  These days can turn violent too.  The thunder clouds that gather often bring quick strong storms, hail, and wind.  The ground shakes at times, the blinding flash of lightning hitting close by.   But once past, the air is clear, raindrops spattering off the trees and rainbows are the rule rather than the exception.

   During those years the evening brought Cecropia and Luna moths to the screen on the sliding patio door, their intricate wings fanning the humid night air softly.  I don’t know where they’ve gone as I haven’t seen one in years, even though I lived in the country for quite some time.  I used to joke that they had been doomed to extinction by high school freshmen collecting insects for biology class; but more likely farm pesticides are the culprit. Monarch butterflies go through their metamorphasis on abundant milkweed stalks; this miracle witnessed many times in a mason jar on the kitchen table.

   Summer nights in Indiana are full of music as crickets, cicadas, and peepers sing their magic.  It is still possible to find a quiet spot not far from town to listen to the natural symphony, watch the moon rise, and imagine this country  as it once was in an older much less populated time. I wonder about the earlier inhabitants.  Did they love the summer as I do?  Did they stop what they were doing to listen and breath deeply of the grass, dry and fragrant and rain on the wind?

  This summer is different from the last fifteen.  For the first time in over 20 years I won’t have children coming and going, supplies to buy,  football banners to help create, transportation logistics to figure out and various school events to attend.  The crushes, dates, heartbreaks, and social functions will be in places where I can’t see the dresses, approve of the boys, or commiserate in detail when events don’t live up to expectation.  The wish I had expressed one Mother’s Day long ago, that I be allowed just one hour to read a book under a tree uninterrupted will be fulfilled.  Funny when you finally get what you want, it turns out it really isn’t what you wanted at all.

  This summer I have come to the conclusion that life is a series of re-inventions.  We re-invent ourselves as we grow to be adults, trying on different personalities through high school and college until we hopefully find the right fit.  But we don’t stop there, we continue changing, growing and sometimes regressing as events over take us.  My most recent redefinition was when I was divorced, and out of necessity, not desire as is this new one.  This last version of me didn’t turn out so badly so perhaps the next one won’t either. 

  There have also been gains this summer.  The daughter of a dear friend who was lost to cancer some years ago has come back to us and she is indeed a great gift.  I had worried for her as given the circumstances of her mother’s death and her age at the time it went very hard with her.  But she returns strong, beautiful, smart, funny and as full of as much life and joy as was her mother.  She is living proof that the human spirit can triumph over adversity, and we can reconnect with those we love.

 My daughters continue to visit my bedroom late at night to flop down on the bed to chat, sometimes seriously, most times not.  My younger daughter included her best girlfriend in this ritual one night recently.  I had the vision of her married with children, trooping upstairs of an evening, the whole family to talk about their day.  I had been thinking of getting rid of my king size bed, but on second thought, maybe not.

  So during this late summer time I wait and consider these latest changes.  Maybe I will just become cranky and set in my ways.  Probably not.  (Not that I am not capable of great crankiness and in short order) But I think something will happen.   I wonder what it will be….