June 8

I started this draft June 8 but it got stuck at loading these photos, spinning for an hour, and took 13 days for me to come back. Who knows what I intended to write? That inspiration is gone with the wind. Today, though, since it took so many hours to load these dang pics, I’ll leave them there for your enjoyment. The first few are a Scout camping trip the two eldest took with their dad. From top down, left to right, Jack on a clifftop; all three (LIAM SMILE!! GODSAKE!!); the boys relaxing after a long day of hiking (after this trip we bought another two camp chairs like the one Liam’s sitting in so now everybody gets a chair); the spouse napping on the grass after a long hike. The bottom three are flowers that Jack and I harvested on another weekend at a U-Pick flower farm nearby that we go to every June. The photos of us actually picking flowers failed to load, and I give up – you’ll just have to imagine us in a later summer afternoon, sun at a low angle, petting the sweet farmer’s dog, wandering among the rows and flicking the flower heads to see if they’re ready.

Now I am doodling plans for a summer trip West we will be taking later this summer, and remembering the last time we went West. The mosaic of vivid random memories popping up from 2022 – without a sense of smell after a recent bout with Covid, I stood in a hotel bathroom unable to sort the boys’ clothes into “Clean” and “Dirty” piles since I couldn’t smell them. On our long drives we listened to Percy Jackson audiobooks, and Liam (whose attention is hard to hold, generally) was hypnotized, fully rapt. On one particularly long, steep, and winding drive, the book made me very sleepy, and I had to pull over to do some jumping jacks and wake myself up. The news article flashed through my head – “Single Car Accident – Mother and Children Careen Over Clifftop in Their Ford Explorer, Driver Lulled to Sleep by Jesse Bernstein’s Narration of Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” Liam and Craig each had daily morning “jobs” – fill our water cups with ice and water; clean out the car of any trash. I’d pack up lunches. We had quite a little routine going by the end of that trip.

Liam will not be with me this time – he is joining the camping Scouts this year. Craiggy boy gets to choose the audiobooks and playlists he is excited about, no turn-taking required. One of my friends noted that after this summer I’ll have taken a solo Mother-Son trip with each of my boys: San Francisco with Jack, Disney with Liam, and now West with Craig. What fun they are – they are growing up, up and away, but we are maximizing every minute.