Surfing East Matunuck State Beach, Narraganset Bay, Rhode Island

Summer has come to New England.  The days are long and perfectly warm punctuated, alternately, by gentle breezes and dark, raging thunderstorms that blow fiercely in and depart as quickly as they came, leaving the whole world washed clean.  There are a lot of places in this world to spend a lovely July, but I’d be hard pressed to name one much nicer than southern New England.  We’re camped, for the moment, within spitting distance of beaches in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, a short train ride from the delights of Boston.  We’re living where our friends want to come to vacation, and come they have, from Florida, New Hampshire, Indiana and beyond.  We’re having a great summer.

me

Among other things, July is birthday season at our house.  Ezra, the 9th, celebrated his 8th, Elisha, just yesterday, joined the downhill slide of double digits and on Friday we’ll have our last round of cake and ice cream as we fete Miss Hannah, on our favorite lake in NH, as she turns fourteen.  The following week, in August, when I turn 36 we’ll have raspberry pie, as I just can’t face a fourth cake within a month, no matter how much I love chocolate.  July is also the month I start planning the coming school year for our kids and boxes of books and supplies begin to arrive to be sorted and organized and chopped up into bite sized chunks to be digested by little pea brains through the long winter months.  July is the month when I’m most likely to step back, recognize my kids for the little strangers that they are, and marvel at how far we’ve come, and how VERY far we still have to go.  This parenthood thing is a marathon.

Boston

I’m pretty sure my kids don’t appreciate the life that they have.  They say they do.  They recognize that their life is not normal.  But really, I don’t think they get it.  They have no frame of reference for what it means to sit in a classroom for eight hours a day, every day, for instance.  How can they appreciate the freedom of their educational experience without that?  None of them can ever remember a time when their experience included any less than two countries, or three languages, at a minimum.  That American culture is what defines “normal” doesn’t even occur to them.  They like it here.  They like that everyone speaks English, that the bathrooms don’t cost a quarter to use, that we can use washing machines instead of hand washing in buckets and that their best friends are within driving distance, but they like other places too.  We got an old book about Tunisia off of a free shelf yesterday.  Elisha flipped through the pages, pointing out the places we visited and the town we lived in.  “This makes me homesick, Mama,” he sighed.  Technically, our kids are American, THIS is their home… but when you’re homeless by choice and the world is your classroom citizenships get blurry and it turns out that the globe shrinks quite a bit and we end up homesick for somewhere almost all of the time.  My kids definitely don’t appreciate the life that they have.  I’m not sure ANY kid appreciates the life that he has, not really.  It isn’t until much later that we develop the perspective on what was, vs. what could have been, vs. what is possible that any of us appreciate our life or our choices for what they are.  Perhaps that lack of appreciation is really my kids’ best feature.  A complete lack of perspective allows them to just grow up, take it all in, not be overly impressed by any of it, and assimilate it all into whoever they are in the end.  It’s fun to watch.

Chichicastenango

I’m homesick for Guatemala at the moment.  Maybe because I’m also working hard and fast on our next set of travel plans.  I’ve got our housing options narrowed down to three places on Lago de Atitlan, in the highlands of Guatemala.  I’m trying to negotiate internet access at the moment.  The worst case scenario will be a two mile walk into town to use the excellent internet at the cafe we so enjoyed last winter, which isn’t a big deal.  The kids are beginning to ask me to make tortillas and I caught Hannah last night practicing her Spanish for, “I’d like a litre of orange juice please, in a bag, with a straw.”  She’s dreaming of the little ladies who have their stalls half way up the hill from the lake and squeeze the oranges for us while we wait each morning.  I’m sure I caught a whiff of the fresh baked coconut bread I bought from Mariella each afternoon as I fell asleep last night.  I’m thinking about where we can buy some kayaks too.

This afternoon I am working by the pool, as usual.  The children are swimming, and enjoying fifty cents worth of candy from the camp store.  Sometimes I think even I don’t appreciate our life.  It’s easy to get bogged down in the schooling, the laundry, the cooking and the cleaning… all of the same things that are hard with a roof overhead, and completely miss the amazing gift that hanging 24-7 with my kids is, that afternoons on Narragansett bay, or watching coffee dry in the sun in Central America, or waking up in our tents in the back yard of dear friends, or sitting around campfires and laughing with new friends is.  There are days when I’m fully present, when I’m here, and nowhere else, when I’m in the moment and I love it.  And then there are days when I miss it altogether and am guilty of wasting the worst thing that can be wasted, life itself.  As I’m taking stock this month, regrouping and planning for the next phase of life, that’s the thing I most want to overcome… my lack of perspective on the great blessing of the only thing I have:  today.