I was on the old road this week, the one that goes from North (where I live) to South (where I grew up), to take me from the here to there. I don't travel this road often, and so it is a route woven into the past: as the mile-tenths slip by, like the film rewinding, isolated frames flash in my mind.
Jumping rope like a cricket on the strip of playground blacktop, where during Field Days I won the fourth grade prize for most jumps in a minute. When I looked up from that triumphant exertion, catching my breath, the cooling, late-May view of surrounding farm meadows and hedgerows of ancient trees in young leaf resonated with my thumping pulse.
The fourth-grade classroom: this is the day, doomsday of the times tables, and the eights are just beyond me. Here comes Mr. Smith down the row, and I just know he's going to give me, "8 times 7." Desperately searching in my memory bank for that deposit, and it isn't there, it isn't there! ...."8 times 8?" ...... "8 times 8!" I don't know, and can only shake my head. He moves on in disgust, down the row, through all the rows, making his point that we don't know what we need to know, and no one but us can put it into us.
On the small and delightfully, fully-appointed stage in the elementary gymnasium, in the sixth-grade chorale production at year's end. This is a big night, and we sixth-graders who "rule the school" are moving on next fall, to the "big school" to become the bottom feeders, as it were. But tonight, we are at the arbitrary pinnacle of elementary experience, and the song is "Hitch Your Dream to the Morning Star." Hitch your dream to the morning star / Start your dream wherever you are / You can make a dream reality / You can make yourself what you want to be. / Don't be discouraged, set your sights high. Sail, o'er the high-flowing tide. Keep your convictions firm and strong, make your horizons wide. Point your life toward the coming day / live your dream in every way / Reach the highest in all you do / This is my wish, this is my wish for you."
It is a subtle thing, isn't it, the transition from looking to the future with its glorious and titillating unknowns, to looking back on the past, once one has lived enough to have some, and finding comfort in the days when things were more pat and clear. But we all come to it at last, that phase in which we know the track to walk to the ultimate destination, and yet it isn't quite in sight some days, and we know the urge to get right down on hands and knees in the trail, and scrabble around a bit for those sure signs learned the hard way, because now they feel like old friends and we can recover them with a few moments' hard focus.
On this particular day, I was grown up for some time now, and living the dream of my Great Awakening from age seven: married and a mother of children, six as it turned out. That was the dream, which included being a mother who sews, knits, bakes and cooks from scratch, and reads aloud. I had also become a cottage-businesswoman, something not in the original scheme, and it was an errand to deliver handknit washcloths for sale, that had me on the road. In another 8 hours or so, I would also learn which part I had been given in a local theater group play. This was another element that had not been in the original blueprint. I had been pondering these recent additions and changes to the everyday, hoping to decide that I could justify branching out from the plain-signature duties of wife-and-motherhood to pursue some former-and-long-shelved interests.
I have found that I can. The former things from former days that shaped me, pointed me and made it fun to be with myself, have been largely and gradually left behind in the name of duty, and I think I have done wrong in that.
Pieces of me have become dulled with disuse. This is logical: I grew up in the ballet classroom and recital stage, with school chorus, drama club playacting and a musical. In college, I sang with an a capella group that travelled New England. For several years as a young mother, I wrote the skits for the children at church to perform. But always these activities were growing less and less. After my two oldest children took part in a Young Actors Workshop with this little theater group in the Spring, I had an acute bout of homesickness for things theatrical and artistic. It started me thinking, I shouldn't feel homesick, and yet it is the exact term for the condition I'm in. I now have three teenaged children, another in double digits and two young children. None of them know me as the singing, dancing, performing girl I was. Come to think of it, none of them know that I have any interests (because I have no activities) outside of...them. The last few years of being their mother and homeschool teacher, 24/7 as we say, have colored the everyday with a shade of relentless perseverance. I have little to talk about at the meal table that everybody doesn't already know, in terms of events at least.
So it is time to let go a little of the all-work-and-no-play, stir up some of the good strong roots and refresh the grafts. Driving from here to there, I made peace with bringing back some of then, to now.
