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Every season, I find, arrives with both gifts and tasks, with limitations and opportunities. Then, when the time is right, one season fades away and a new one turns up with different light, different duties and a new perspective.
When the warm weather finally comes, I vow every year that this will be the summer when I do less, host less, plant less and travel less. I will sit on the porch with iced tea, go to the coast on a whim and watch sunsets.
Then, giddy with sunshine and warmth, I fill the porch with potted geraniums and hanging petunia baskets, plant 100 dahlia tubers and buy tomato starts from an enterprising young person at a farmers’ market. Deluded into thinking I am still energetic and young, I take on huge projects: a garage sale, planning a camping trip or a family reunion, welcoming anyone who wants to come for a visit. We watch the grass seed harvest happening all around us, grill piles of hamburgers and make gallons of iced tea.
Instead of sitting on the porch and watching sunsets, I spend July and August hoeing and weeding, hauling hoses and setting sprinklers, preparing meals and beds for guests and packing and unpacking before and after trips. What was I thinking, committing to this as though I’m still 25 years old?
By late August, it feels like a desperate and losing battle to keep everything alive and semi-clean. The lilacs and hydrangeas are drooping, and the lawn and maples are brown. Only the blackberries in the fencerows are thriving.
Meanwhile, dust and cobwebs are taking over the house, and all my attempts to fight back feel futile, especially when the neighboring farmers plow their fields and giant clouds of brown dust billow behind their tractors, wafting toward our house to drift through every open window and settle on bookshelves and tables.
Then, one day, working in my writing cabin with the fan turned on, I am startled to hear an acorn drop with a loud clank on the corrugated tin roof, announcing the coming switch in seasons. “Already?” I think. “But I still haven’t had time to really enjoy summer!”
Two weeks later, the rain arrives, gentle and thorough, replenishing lawns and lilacs, dahlias and daisies. I sit on the porch, relaxing at last, inhaling the scent of rain on dry earth and watching all the watering that’s happening without any effort from me.
Next summer, I decide, I need to be more realistic about the season of life I’m in.
To everything there is a season, the Bible says in Ecclesiastes. To be born, to die, to plant and to pluck up what is planted. To break down and to build up, to keep and to cast away.
After many frantic years of raising a family of six children, the acorns are dropping in this season of our lives and marriage.
Our son Ben and his wife, Elizabeth, came for dinner last week. I mentioned that Paul and I had gone to the 99 Grill in Harrisburg for dinner the night before. “We’ve been there for breakfast many times,” I said. “But somehow never for dinner. I got a California burger on lettuce instead of a bun, with grilled mushrooms, and it was amazing.”
Ben looked amused. “Have you become those retired people who randomly go out to eat?”
Yes, I realized, we had. And I have no idea how or when this happened.
We carefully budgeted for food and prepared it in huge quantities and almost entirely from scratch when the kids were all living at home. Even fast food was out of reach, so eating out was only for very special occasions.
Having the children grow up and leave home freed up surprising amounts of cash, and gradually we became one of those gray-haired couples in rain-proof jackets at Tin Sing or Toreros or the 99 Grill on a normal weeknight, sitting across from each other without talking much.
Having a little more spending money is a gift of this season, bringing opportunities I didn’t have at age 30.
Being my age brings other opportunities as well, tasks that I didn’t see coming and ways to serve that I wasn’t qualified for until now. I want to make the most of it while rationing my energy, which has dwindled alarmingly in the last 10 years.
“I’m wondering if we could meet and talk about parenting teenagers,” a couple of women have asked me. I think surely they must be thinking of someone else, some put-together person who knew what they were doing instead of floundering through those years like a beginning swimmer in a strong current.
“I think scripture says the older women are supposed to teach the younger,” my friend Manya reminded me gently when I tried to explain my incompetence.
Her math was correct: I am over 20 years older than she. And she knew I couldn’t argue with a Bible verse. So we met with another friend, Jane, and talked for two hours. Deep in conversation, I realized that my haphazard middle-aged years had given me the gift of clarity. I had a good idea of what worked and what didn’t, in parenting, marriage and life in general. Maybe this mandate was mine to embrace.
The dahlias are blooming wildly while they still have the chance, and the leaves are dropping from the oaks. It’s a new season of the year and a new one in my life, with every end bringing a new beginning, and every limitation a gift of clarity and insight.
