Tuesday, September 20, 2011

From my upstairs window I hear a log truck jake-braking up the rise by Huntress Cemetery, then sputtering, then fading down the road toward town. Yesterday Paul scored all three goals in Harmony's first soccer game of the season as I sat in my broken lawn chair and flapped at a cloud of desperate, late-season midges. I felt, as one does feel with growing children, as if the world no longer belongs to me. It is a melancholy sensation but bearable, though in my case unreliably mixed up with head-cold apathy. Tomorrow, perhaps, my vim will reassert itself. I would like to imagine that I am intelligent, energetic, and passionate, and I have hopes of being so in the near future. Nonetheless, there is no returning to those moments of youth, when a child suddenly realizes his body's potential for adult flight. I sit in my midgy lawn chair and I am glad for him, but my eyes prickle with what might be tears or might be an oncoming sneeze, and in the meantime the sun shoots its last cloudy rays over the field and parents next to me complain about something or other and I blow my nose and soldier on.

1 comment:

Julia Munroe Martin said...

Right there with you -- both my kids are out of the house. And last weekend, at the welcome ceremony as my son started *med school*, I felt that same feeling... the world no longer belongs to me, nor even do his moments, his landmarks, as I wrote in my blog post today. It truly is a melancholy sensation. (p.s. hope your cold feels better soon!)