Life, and Death, and Life

It is three weeks since I have written here, and I could write a book, or more, on why, but I will not--and not just because I clearly am having some problems producing copy. But I will use my three week absence as a transition into the notion of passing of time, which is something I have been thinking a lot about of late.

I am one of those people for whom September will forever mean back-to-school. Not only was I in school for most of my life, but my mother's life--and therefore the cycle of our family life--revolved around the opening of school each fall, and I grew up in New England, where the demarcation from summer to fall is practically tangible.

This is a good thing. I like cycles and patterns and rhythm. I like that first morning when a leaf blows across your line of vision as you're walking down the street and you think: a fluke, an errant leaf, and then another one flies by. And that first evening when the skin on your arms is a tiny bit cold and you hug yourself and think about cardigan sweaters. And I like the beginning of things, too, and although I know some see fall as the last gasp before winter, it has never seemed that way to me.

Now I have a daughter who was born in early September, a time of year I never thought of for birthdays. It is such a period of transition, one season fading away, the next assuming its place so gradually and effortlessly that if you blink you miss it happening at all. Cool mornings, hot afternoons, and the breeze kicking up at dinnertime. Early September.

Time passes, cycles through its seasons, and how can we, if we want to, alter the path? Sometimes, with certain patterns, we cannot. Today I watched from the hallway as Scout, whose true age we do not know, made his usual run for and leap onto the bed and failed to get his hind legs up. His heavy body pulled his back end down to the ground; his front paws remained on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he just stayed like that, in limbo, between the bed and the floor, unaware that I was watching. I hurried to him, bent and heaved him up all the way, and he rolled over on his side, content, the failure already forgotten, and placed his paw on my arm, looking up at me with trust and adoration. I squinted hard to keep from crying.

What of a cycle of disappointment, of our inability to see sometimes what happens again and again? Can we change people's expectations, or our own behavior? Can we change the way we see the world? Expressions tell us no, that we become "set in our ways," that we "can't teach an old dog new tricks." Not so, I think, having taught an old dog to shake paws; not so, I hope so hard, having seen those I love unable to see the patterns, let alone escape them.

Annika is two. She is establishing the patterns; the cycles are emerging, the seasons so new as to seem unfamiliar. She greets each day with a smile and outstretched arms, is somehow both messy and fastidious, as independent as her sister, funny and so often amused, and different each day, each hour, than she was the one before. She is no longer a baby but not yet a girl; her cycle is the same as Scout's. Time passes. We change, and we do not. Summer wanes, fall rises to meet the void, and before long the days are long again. School begins, with all of the promise of the best of beginnings, we blink--we heave our shiny new backpacks onto our shoulders--and suddenly the year is over all over again.

Were you worried? Have you missed me? I don't mean to be coy. I have missed this, though. I see it now, in the middle of it--or now, I realize--at the end. Don't worry. I say this to myself. I will write. I am writing. And time, as they say, marches on.