Summer's Lease

I understand most of the country has been sweltering through a miserable heat wave, but we have been having an unbroken streak of perfect weather (except for one day that dipped its toe in the 90's): morning after morning of cool air and clouds blowing in off the ocean, to burn off to sunshine and 70s by mid-afternoon. 

With only the twins around (Deux is helping out Bookworm until the addition is finished), and them having achieved the all-but-adult age of 17, summer looks very different from years past. Dash is working at a couple of different things and drives himself everywhere he needs to go, and a few places we need him to. Dame is plowing through 18-book series and occasionally emerging to pontificate on centaur spines and whether harpies would lay eggs. The only thing that carries over from years ago is the usefulness of stocking the freezer with ice cream sandwiches.

It's a mercy the summer is mild, because at the current state of the addition not only do we not have air conditioning, which we have never had, we also have minimal air circulation with one whole side of the house blocked off. However, after a stall of a few months work is supposedly going to resume soon. 

Having set the goal of climbing a mountain, and finding myself with the forgotten luxury of a little more time and energy than is strictly necessary for survival, I've been adding to my daily routine a mile and a half loop around as many neighborhood hills as I can manage with a loaded pack on my back. It's been rather exciting to actually be growing detectably stronger--a month ago, I needed to pause a few times on this loop. Now, even at the end of a long day, I can do it easily with increased speed on the uphills. Two weeks ago Dash and I hiked up a smaller, closer mountain and I struggled to go more than a dozen steps uphill at a stretch and never made it quite to the summit. Yesterday we did the same trail again and I paused less than a third of the times, made it to the summit, and still cut 45 minutes off my time. Right now the main concern about our goal hike is that the trails are closed due to a threatening wildfire, and while the weather has not been hot, neither have we had any rain to speak of nor are likely to before September. 

Thanks to this gorgeous arrangement getting stuck in my head, I've been memorizing Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. It's always struck me as odd. Beautiful, expertly crafted, but weird. It's not really about the beloved--in which, to be fair, it is not unlike most love poetry, which tends to be about the sensation of love rather than the parties involved. But it's not really about being in love, either. It's about the poet's expectation of the immortality of his own poetry. (About which, to be fair, he was not wrong.) But perhaps that is because a large part of what love, or at least the feeling of being "in love" is about--the sensation of touching immortality, even though, paradoxically, only for a moment. 

It seems, at least to me, that a large part of the transition from falling in love to mature love is letting go of the vision of the idealized and immortal beloved and accepting the messy human that they are now. It is like in the movie Inception where Cobb rejects his dream-wife to return to the reality where his real wife is dead: "But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough." In time it is the annoying, imperfect, mortal being we come to love. 

Perhaps parenting is a bit like that, too. Babies are, for the most part, very easy to fall in love with because they are wide open for the imagination, because they give us a brush with immortality. And to a baby or toddler, a parent is all wise and all powerful. It would be heady stuff if one weren't so sleep-deprived. But adolescence comes and not only does the child realize his parents are human, the parents have to come to term with the child being human, of growing up into an ordinary person with an ordinary skill set and ordinary range of foibles. It's a difficult process for the parent, not just the child, but both of the alternatives--the parent who sees the grown child with all the rosy intoxication of infancy, and the parent who has never gotten over the disappointment of humanity--turn into something hideous in time.