Claire Gillian

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This month’s AW Blog Chain subject is “Seasons” and the guidelines were thus:

You can take this from any angle: a story/poem about your favorite season, a description of the change of seasons, an explanation why a season inspires you more than another, etc. Just have fun with it!

I am bookended by a gulp-worthy pair–was preceded in this month’s chain by Hillaryjacques and will be followed by Laffarsmith. The entire list of participants is at the end of this post.

Summer

I look at my children, in the late Spring of their young lives while my mirror tells me I am in the Fall of mine. We meet in the middle in Summer.

In that season, I watch them make memories on lazy days when nights are long and mornings are languished away in crisp cotton sheets that smell of musty heads and dirty feet.

Do they know that I have my own such memories?

Have I told them of the times I jumped on trampolines, or stole pecans from backyards, or snuck into underground parking lots to skate on the smoothest concrete in town? Like me, will they ride an old rope swing, suspended nearly one hundred feet from the limb of a tree, and experience its tummy tingling floaty flight? What about breaking the glass-like surface of a swimming pool after a warm summer’s rain has made it so soft it scarcely feels like water?

I watch them picking the blackberries that grow amongst the brambles, sun-warmed sweetness whose only prep is a minor amount of dusting. These are the summer fruits of the Pacific Northwest, so very different from my childhood in the South where peaches reigned supreme. Also missing are roller skates; the Ripstick or Razor scooter are the rides of choice now. A bicycle will do in a pinch, but there are no cards in the spokes or banana seats, heaven forbid.

I watch the leaves begin to fall in my backyard and know that the green will soon yield entirely to brown. And as I waken my children for the first day of school, their young heads still shaking off slumber’s grip, we both feel the pang of a Summer that ended far too soon.