A few years ago, my father handed me a stack of photographs that I shoved into a drawer and promptly forgot about. One day, no doubt running late, I rummaged around in that drawer looking for a scarf and found the secret snapshot stash. A picture — the picture you see above — fell to the floor, and I burst out laughing at this unexpected visit from my five year-old self. (If you have any doubt about the age, check the right hand and the enormous round head of my baby brother.) I have no memory of the events behind the picture, although it was taken at my grandmother’s house, but I have many memories of the dress, since it was my favorite. I selected the apple fabric, insisted on the lace, and could not wait for my mother to finish making it, a sweatshop endeavor under the watchful eye of a loud, bossy, talkative kindergarten foreman. (I should mention here that my mother is a life-long teetotaler. I am not quite sure how she managed that.)

But I looked at that picture, and I loved that kid. She is very clearly her own person, crazed look and all, full of wonder, storming the world, and taking it all in. Having found that picture about the time that I came out of an awkward phase lasting — oh, I don’t know — roughly four decades, I decided to make her my spirit animal and to try to be myself as much as I was at age five.

This has been a fun undertaking, and especially for my birthday a few Saturdays ago. It is nice to have a day that the world celebrates with you. You may be wondering how exactly the world knew that it was my birthday, and I will tell you: I told everyone. (This is not an exaggeration. By “everyone,” I genuinely mean everyone.) And so I received a few hugs, many good wishes — and more to the point, free ice cream for breakfast, free cake for dinner, and a free trinket in the afternoon. It is good that my birthday comes but once a year. Otherwise, the local economy might collapse. But as I blew out the candle on my (free) birthday cake, I thought not of new dresses and fabulous presents and staying up late — all thoughts that I would have had at five — but of how wonderful the day had been, since it was not terribly different from most days in recent memory. I felt beloved and comfortable in my own skin, which, too, was a gift, but one that a 48 year-old appreciates far more than a five year-old.

So I dashed off the paragraphs above, got distracted, and before I could finish my story, the three of us — Chris, our daughter, and I — loaded up for his extended family’s beach vacation. The assembled masses included a niece, who had just turned six — and who made me realize that I perhaps had romanticized childhood just a wee tiny bit when I decided to adopt my five year-old self as my spirit animal. There was fun and a sense of wonder, to be sure, and noise and drama and a love of shiny things. But there was a fair amount of frustration that accompanied being very small in a very big world, mostly in the form of exasperated adults who would not cede to one’s plans for total world domination.

I will confess here to being one of the exasperated adults. Unwilling to capitulate, unsure of how to solve the insoluble problem of keeping a small child happy, I did what any responsible middle-aged aunt would do: I simply disappeared. Even as the words “Where is Aunt Amy Lee?” were being uttered, I practically vaporized into a veritable mist of brightly colored cotton, trailing the faint scent of lemons behind me.

I enjoyed the escape into a secret world, sometimes with Chris and sometimes alone, where I did a lot of walking. I would tell you that I walked until I got tired, but I am not sure that that is possible. I never tire of walking — especially on a beach, with the steady beat of one foot in front of the other, the footprints visible in the sand, the waves coming in and the waves going out. I saw birds eating breakfast and sunrises and sunsets. I watched a pod of dolphins surfing in the waves, their grey bodies visible as the transparent water began to crest.

One night, a few nights after my birthday, was nothing short of magical. Most of the extended family was out, walking in clusters. Our daughter pointed behind her — what’s that? — and as Chris and I turned, we saw a blood moon rising in the night sky. I had never seen anything like it, with the intensity of the oranges and reds bouncing off the ocean as the moon traveled upwards. As I turned back around, I saw four of the cousins walking in a tidal pool, and I snapped this photo:

I saw stars and constellations that I had never seen, and my father-in-law pointed out Venus and Mars, two spots that were too bright to be stars. And not to be outdone, someone started to shoot off fireworks on our walk out to the point, and on the way back, someone else started to shoot off more. If you want to talk about a sense of wonder, if you want to talk about delight, then let’s talk about that night, for there I was, a belly full of (free) birthday cake yet again, walking with people I love, being amazed by the beauty around me. Like a child, I felt very small in a very big world. But it did not frustrate me, for I was exactly where I needed to be.

A few nights later, I got the details of exactly how small I was, and exactly how very big the world is, from Chris. I should mention here that when I read the “The Sun Also Rises,” this quote — sort of an existentialist manifesto — resonated with me: “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” While I care about things very deeply indeed, my base of knowledge tends to be miles wide and inches deep — hence, my success at cocktail parties — and reflects a certain lack of desire to know exactly how things work. It is enough for me to put gas in the car, to flip the switch, to perform many small acts of what have to be magic during the day to power my world and take me places.

This is where Chris comes in. I am telling you now that Chris is THE scientific American, and sometimes when I have trouble falling asleep at night, I ask him to explain quantum physics to me. (It works like a charm.) One evening at the beach, after the two of us cooked dinner for the family, I asked him to disappear with me, and the two of us walked alone on the beach. He is a good husband, and he likes to tell me things, so I asked, “Exactly who is Neil deGrasse Tyson?” And Chris was off to the races. Hand in hand, we moved from Tyson to Carl Sagan, from the galaxy to the universe, from the tension between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Chris talked excitedly while I occasionally asked questions to prompt him or to clarify finer points. But all I could think of was this: In a few centuries, what we know now will be as inconsequential and as foolish as treating patients with leeches, as the fear of boats sailing off the ends of a flat earth, as the supposition of turtles all the way down.

But you have to start somewhere. You have to build on what you know. You have to be five, with a sense of wonder about exactly how big the world is, and you have to be 48, too, and feel that same wonder. That’s just how it works.

ALC

When Chris and I returned from Beachview on Saturday, we loaded the kids into the car and went to lunch. As the four of us pulled into the driveway, my daughter thought she saw an owl sitting in a palm tree. We all sat very still, and as the closest thing this family has to an orinthologist, the three of them waited for me to weigh in. Fortunately for me, it was an easy identification: It was a juvenile red-tailed hawk. He flew away as we exited the car. As I wrote yesterday about the trip to Beachview, I looked over my computer screen and out the study window, only to see a juvenile hawk staring at me, this time sitting much higher in the same palm tree. And this morning, the first thing I saw when I walked downstairs and looked out my kitchen window was this:

The hawk sat on the back of a patio chair, staring intently at two squirrels that were pillaging the bird feeder. The hawk did not move — certainly it was the squirrels’ lucky day — and so keen was his focus that he did not see me watching him.

Seeing me staring out the kitchen window is a familiar sight for my family, and over the years, they have each cultivated a respectful, soft tread when I am watching the birds. So this morning, as I looked outside, my son crept up, pointed to the hawk, and gave me a silent thumbs up. I captured several photos of the predator and then turned to make our breakfast.

My son and I sat in companionable silence, side by side at the kitchen island where he has had his breakfast probably as long as he can remember, and I tried to hold it together as he tried not to seem too excited. He thanked me for everything, and I told him that I had just been doing my job, and he said that I had done a good one.

He left for college this morning.

The juvenile hawk helped.

So does the writing.

Esoterically speaking, writing helps me process things and make sense of the world. Practically speaking, the blog is the closest thing I have to a journal — yes, you are reading my diary — and I record moments that I might have otherwise forgotten. So on January 6, I wrote about walking to my car before work one morning and almost getting hit in the head as a juvenile hawk flew past me. It seemed like a harbinger for the year ahead, a year that would hold my son’s leaving the nest, and a year that would allow me to reclaim some time for myself — an effort that had begun by my seeing a movie solo. (You can take my word for it, or read the post — Resolution — here.)

Here I am, six months later, having seen a movie the day before with my son, having now come full circle with another juvenile hawk. And not just any juvenile hawk, but one who appeared to my family, to me as I wrote about my difficulty in letting go, and to my son and me right before breakfast on my son’s last morning at home. You know what? That hawk’s mother was nowhere to be found. There was no nudge to attack the hapless squirrels at the feeder. There was no call and response. There was no sight of the nest. Only a single young hawk, studying the world and making his own decisions.

Coincidence? The divine? The ravings of a demented blogger? Who cares. The human mind — or at least, my human mind — loves connections, and this, more than anything else, felt like a moment of pure serendipity. Although I cried when he pulled out of the drive — did you expect any less? — I knew that he would be just fine. In the past few hours, I have received a series of very happy messages from him, all telling me exactly where he is in the world, all telling me just how excited he is, and all telling me that he loves me very much.

Me? I am happy, too. How could I not be?

ALC

About two weeks ago, I read an article in The New York Times called “Think Less, Think Better.” The author, a neuroscientist, discussed a study that demonstrated “that the capacity for original and creative thought is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of ‘mental load.'” One of the series of experiments involved dividing the participants into two groups — one had to memorize a string of seven digits, the other had to memorize a string of two digits — and while the participants “maintained these strings in working memory,” the scientists engaged in word association, giving the participants a word and having them respond as quickly as possible. The group that had to memorize seven digits gave more prosaic associations: The scientists would say “white,” and the participants would say “black.” But the group that had to memorize only two digits had more creative, less typical, and more varied responses: The scientists would say “white,” and the participants would say “cloud.” Of particular interest was that the group with the higher mental load (that is, the seven digit group) took longer to generate a conventional response; the two digit group responded more quickly and more interestingly. The author ended the article by noting that as a birthday gift to himself for the last few years had been a week of silence at a mediation retreat — which led to a “wonderfully magnified experience of the world.”

Even with the promise of a  “wonderfully magnified experience of the world,” a week of silence would be nearly impossible for me. For instance? When Chris and I first married, he made a perfectly reasonable request: He needed to be alone for a while. And I, the eternal extrovert, responded, “Sure. Do you want me to go with you?”

This was not an intentionally funny response.

But the last few months have been staggering in my mental load department. It is as if I have been asked to memorize a string of 49 digits, and when a scientist utters the word “white,” all I can do is stare blankly and say (after a notable silence), “White?” I attribute the load to work and life, my son’s planned exit for college, a big family vacation, and the stress of being home for a mere 20 days before leaving on another vacation. I had deadlines at work! I would miss my son’s last full week at home! There was laundry to do and bills to pay and spin classes to teach and Target trips to make and a yard to be mowed and an old dog to be fed and and and

They all waited. (Well, except for the dog, and he got fed.)

In a cosmic stroke of good luck, a year ago I booked (and more importantly, paid for) a cottage on Beachview Drive in Saint Simons Island. The cottage is small, no more than 600 square feet, and right on the beach. It comfortably holds two people, assuming that those two people are very close, and as I have learned from three prior trips, it holds very few of their possessions. To pack for Beachview, one must anticipate a small shelf in a narrow bathroom for toiletries, an almost comical galley kitchen, and a small cupboard and four drawers for clothes. My clothes fit into a duffel bag, and my jewelry fit into a small spare purse.

There was, at the outset, a trip to the grocery store, one forevermore known to me as the Socially Awkward Publix. At my local Publix, apparently populated by my fellow extroverts, employees come out of the woodwork to make sure that I can find (for instance) exactly the brand of hot sauce that I seek. They are everywhere, these employees, making eye contact and smiling, solicitous and eager, willing to reach the item on the top shelf just out of reach. But that was not this Publix. Oh, no. I found myself watched at a distance in the produce section by an employee behind a towering cart of corn; sprinted from in the dairy section; studiously ignored in the bakery section. Once and again, the denizens of the Socially Awkward Publix left me to my own devices, all without eye contact and engagement. The checkout found me face-to-face, if not exactly eyeball-to-eyeball, with the employee with the greatest gift of gab, one who first asked for ID to confirm the beer sale and then launched into a very unusual, very long story. (Punch line: she adopted a 31 year-old alcoholic.) Meanwhile, the bagger, who clearly had heard the story before, emitted ill-timed laughs as he anticipated the punch line.

It was the island of misfit toys, grocery store edition, and while it was unusual, it was not unpleasant. High shelves and all, I found and purchased my groceries without any psychic damage, and I thought about the many times that I had labored, at least metaphorically speaking, at the Socially Awkward Publix. (Who among us has not?)

So with the groceries, the duffel bag of clothes, the small purse of jewelry, two pairs of shoes, two hats, and Chris, I headed to Beachview. The clothes fit here

the jewelry fit here

and for a delicious week, everything fit into a single spot.

(Now, I will grant you that that is a fair amount of jewelry, and it mostly was for naught. I mostly wore the wooden beads, the shell necklace, the Tiki head to the right of the photo — an odd combination that delighted me, for it looked like the locals, my fellow South Georgians, had rushed to greet me and adorn me with trinkets, all in a manner more appropriate to the South Seas.)

Excess jewelry aside, there was no temptation to accumulate, for there was no place to put the ensuing accumulation. I made as few choices as possible. Taking a page from the book of the Socially Awkward Publix, I kept mostly to myself. All of this — the tidiness, the lack of choice, the keeping to myself — was good, for I was exhausted, too tired often to read, able only to sit and stare at the ocean. And when that made me tired, I punctuated it with a nap.

Twice a day, Chris and I took a walk. To minimize my wardrobe choices for these walks, I put bathing suit tops in one drawer, bottoms in another, and I would draw blindly from each. This led to interesting combinations, all to the looming question: Should I really be wearing this? It was both a superficial question (is a navy polka dot bottom and a hot pink camouflage top simply too weird?) and a body question (should a 47 year-old woman really wear a bikini?). But I answered both with a resounding yes, the former mitigated with the trinkets and the dermatologist-approved cover ups, the latter mitigated with an important realization: While no one who saw me in a bathing suit would mistake me for a 20 year-old, no one would mistake me for a 20 year-old when I opened my mouth, either.

One of the things that I would change about myself in a heartbeat is my body’s response to heartache: I am struck with chest pain and shortness of breath — literal heartache, indeed. The first few times it happened, it terrified me, for I was certain that I was going to die. But now, aware of broken heart syndrome (scientific name: stress-induced cardiomyopathy), I take a deep breath and calm down and try to pinpoint the source of the broken heart. So as Chris and I walked, often in silence with fingers intertwined and feet in the ocean, I struggled to figure out why my heart was breaking. “It’s our son, isn’t it? He’s leaving for college, and you’re heart-broken.” And there, on the beach, I burst into tears. Just because it’s time for him to leave doesn’t make it any easier. Oh no. Not at all. And so our walks fell into a familiar rhythm, one punctuated with arrhythmia on my part, and of tears and memories and happy times ahead.

On the last morning, I got up and walked alone. It was early, and I felt certain that my dermatologist would excuse the lack of sunscreen and protective clothing. I felt certain that I would not excuse the lack of accessories, so to my mismatched bathing suit I added a red hat, purple sunglasses, trinkets, and lipstick. For a split second outside the Beachview cottage, I contemplated the casual physical inventory all too familiar to woman: the poke at an imperfect stomach, the dismay at imperfect flesh. But I stopped myself, just in time, to instead stand tall, head held high. As I made it to the turnaround point, a black-clad woman walked by me, and schooled in the ways of the Socially Awkward Publix, I ignored her. She stopped, turned around, and grabbed my forearm. “You look fantastic,” she said. “I mean it. You look fabulous.” I do not know why she said that, although I didn’t particularly care. “Thank you,” I responded. “I am almost 48.” “I am 51,” she replied. “Keep it up, girl.”

And so it is. Time marches on. When I was almost 28, I wondered what it would be like having children. At almost 38, I had an 8 year-old and a 7 year-old, and overwhelmed, frazzled, and putting too much pressure on myself, I sometimes wondered why I had had children at all. Now, the older is leaving for college, and the younger is beginning her last, suddenly solo, stretch with us. I wonder where the days have gone. I wonder whether I have wrung each and every drop of joy out of each and every day. To ward off the heartache, I took a deep breath, stood up straighter, burst into tears, and walked back to Beachview. It was time to go home, to await the passage of another year.

Keep it up, girl.

ALC