Falling Back
October 20, 2009
Falling Back
In autumn time is jumbled—fast-forwarded, yet simultaneously slowed. Maybe it’s the way the leaves change colour seemingly every hour, definitely day by day. Or the way the mornings feel like winter, bright afternoons like summer, and evenings like the season it is. Maybe it’s that returning to schedules makes everything feel rushed after summer’s meandering. And then there are the quick-to-come-long-to-leave dark hours of stretching winter nights. But whatever the reason, I feel time—its effect, its pressure, its gift—more tangibly in the fall.
A few of the latest reminders of how fast time goes:
I have a 16-year-old daughter. When I wrote my first column for The Standard, she needed a car seat. Now she’s in the driver’s seat. When I look over at her adjusting the mirrors and fiddling with the stereo, I don’t see a young woman, taller than me. I see a toddler’s blonde sticky-uppy ponytails bent intently over the plastic steering wheel of her bright yellow ride-on racecar.
I have a 13-year-old son. I thought that him turning thirteen wouldn’t feel strange, seeing as I’d already done the have-my-baby-become-a-teenager thing. Wrong. It was absolutely bizarre. After all, he was my baby-baby; my daughter had been “big” (her proclamation) since he was born when she was almost three. Now I have two teenagers. No babies. Can I still call them that though, please? (“Mooom, you’re sooo weird!”—I’ll take that as a no . . .)
June 2010 is the 20th anniversary of my high school graduation. I have been married for over eighteen years. My baby sister is 31 ½. (The last was the real shock; I can never remember she’s actually turned 30, let alone surpassed it.) I am 37! (A year I always looked forward to and so far, so good!)
A chime announcing that no matter how quickly it moves, in important ways time doesn’t change you:
I spent last weekend helping my 80-year-old grandma move from her farm in Hazelton to a shiny one-bedroom apartment in Houston—just across the hall from her 82-year-old sister’s suite. It’s hard for my brain to reconcile the age eighty with who they are, giggling and whispering, full of plans to gallivant (a Hawaii cruise), walk to exercise classes, feast regularly at a nearby Chinese restaurant, go visit with their other siblings and children . . . Their excitement about living back in such close proximity was cute and somehow comforting.
Time doesn’t end. It exists as is, made up of all that’s gone before. I don’t just have a sixteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old. I have them, plus who they were at every age and stage. My husband and I will (soon) celebrate 19, then 20, then . . . many more years (hopefully!), but we are also just met, just friends, just falling in love . . . My grandma would say (laughing), “I’m an old woman,” but she’s also a kid in a warm blue hood riding a toboggan with her slightly older sister who wears bright red. She’s a young woman going to the city with that same sled-riding sister to get a higher education. She’s a teacher in small rural school. She’s a new bride and a widow. A mother of eleven! A little treasured sister. A grandma. A great-grandma. At eighty, still a cheeky kid: “You may look younger than me, Mary, but I look more intelligent!”
Soon we’ll set our clocks back an hour and I’ll revel in the delicious feeling of having more time, knowing full well that’s just a trick. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow, time passes whether we hold on tight or let it go. I want to savour it.
First published in The Terrace Standard, Oct. 14, 2009
