Spring break

Every year since our sons were very young, our family has come to Florida for a week of visits with the grandparents and a welcome respite from the back side of winter.

Yesterday morning, we stepped out our back door at 4:30 am, into a torrent of freezing rain, gusting wind, slush.  In darkness, eyes still sleep-sandy, we made our way along the empty, icy roads to the airport — bright lights, security lines, hot Starbucks coffee.

As always, the contrasts of the day astonished me.  It is surreal, to wake up in one familiar place and go to sleep hours later in another.  My parents’ airy, modern home  on a densely populated saltwater canal couldn’t be more different than our own rustic wooden house in New Hampshire.  In the course of one day we exchange dirty snow and still-bare trees for lush green lawn, bougainvillea, and rustling palms; fleeces and boots and gloves for shorts and sunglasses and bare feet.  Drum fish commence their percussive mating call in the water beyond the open bedroom windows, the temperature is a mild sixty-eight degrees, the kitchen fruit bowl overflows with strawberries, avocados, cantaloupe.

There isn’t much to do here — no beach nearby, no cool sights to see or touristy events to attend.  When the boys were little we would treat them to a Little Rascals video, go out for a pancake breaksfast, set up coloring books outdoors, play games of Clue.  A trip to the Dairy Queen or a round of miniature golf might be the focus of the day.  Yet, year after year, we’ve come back, to do pretty much the same things we did the year before — spending a few days with Steve’s parents three hours north of my folks, visiting my aunt and uncle, relaxing with my mom.  Meanwhile, our sons grew up.  Over time, Netflix movies replaced the Little Rascals, video games edged out board games (though Scrabble and Bananagrams have brought us back together around the table), laptops have taken the place of coloring books and crayons. Pancakes and Dairy Queen are still part of the agenda, though they don’t elicit the excitement they once did.

Waking up this morning on the fold-out couch in the den, to the smell of fresh coffee and the low coo of mourning doves,  I was overcome with a sense of the long, slow passage of time.  How much has changed in our lives, even as this one annual ritual has held.  The privilege of being both mother and daughter in this house will come to an end, I know.  The day will arrive when our boys will no longer choose a visit to grandma as a spring-break destination.  My parents, in their seventies, cannot be our hosts forever. There are plenty more changes in store.

And so I am grateful for every morning that we find ourselves here, in any family combination, waking to birdsong and the sound of my mom making coffee in the kitchen.  In recent years, Steve’s father has passed away, and his mother has declined into the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s.  My aunt, sick for several years, passed in December.  Our sons, at different schools, have different vacation schedules now, without even a single day of overlap.  The family vacation of old has been transformed this year into a new, staggered arrangement of comings and goings.  Everyone will get here, but not at the same time.  This week, Jack is with us.  Henry will arrive for his own spring break soon after his dad and brother head back north.  For a few days in between boys’ visits,  my mom and I will be all alone together — rarely possible when my two sons were both at home, but a special perk of this new life chapter.

Slowly, I’m learning to accept — no, appreciate — the possibilities of our new reality.  Needed less by my own children these days, I am free to create new, closer relationships with my parents.  At seventeen, the age my son Jack is now, I considered an evening spent home alone with my mom and dad as some kind of social failure on my part.  Now, at fifty-one, it is a rare treat.

Last summer, my feelings were often bruised by the sight of my son pacing the house, cell phone pressed to his ear, trying to make a plan, any plan, that would get him out of the house for the night.  What I should have remembered, of course, is that life is transformation.  The present moment is always in the process of becoming something else, just as our children are always growing and changing, becoming fuller expressions of themselves.  They flee our presence as if pre-programmed to do so, and then they return, in time, by their own volition.  Tonight, the old cribbage board has been taken out of the closet.  As I sit here typing, Jack and Steve are side by side on the couch, shuffling cards, laughing, relaxed, talking in their own peculiar shorthand.  We are three generations here under one roof, not quite a complete family, but content with one another’s company.  Sort of like old times, but different.