“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
-Ed Prentiss, 1965, Days of Our Lives
Under the trees a memory takes root
Friday was Professional Development day at my son’s school, meaning the entire public school population was turned loose upon the city. Working and nonworking parents alike had their little ones back for a day. Middle schoolers slept in, catching up on six weeks of lost sleep, offering up for parents their first opportunity to let their kids stay by themselves for an entire day. I’m assuming high schoolers did the same thing, waking only to slide into their electronic multimedia world, free from class bells and pesky teachers requesting their attention.
I wanted a day together, and made sure I kept nothing on my calendar. But what to do – it was likely to be gray, dreary and wet. We could go to the movies, stay at home and play (or watch movies at home), head to a museum or aquarium or zoo or any of the educational places to which we have memberships, yet I find I often don’t want to go. That much exposure to that many hyper kids and harried parents isn’t my thing, as I bristle at the family-frenzied chaos and clamor, the low-level roar broken from time to time by piercing cries or high-pitched screams, followed by parents yelling at their kids to stop crying and screaming, and the ominous, gutteral, teeth-baring parental hiss, “Do you want to go back to the car?”
No, I wanted something that felt more like a day trip, a little time away, an adventure that would lay down memories for both my son and me. [This, by the way, is my latest thing, and if you know anything about a person with a “latest thing,” you know you’re gonna be hearing about this for a while. It goes something like this: I’m an older parent, so I’m likely to be quite old while my son is still youthful, and likely to be dead before he’s middle-aged. Therefore, I’ve gotta give him a lifetime of experiences that will fill him up, pouring sand grains of maternal love and memories into the hourglass of his life, that will somehow help him live the final half of his life fully and with great love and meaning because he’ll have enough sand to last when the hourglass flips to the side that has no living parents, and ultimately he won’t have missed out on anything by having an old mother to begin with. And don’t worry – I’m not saying any of this is true, it’s just a thing, which means I’m treating it like truth, and there we have it.]
I decided we’d go on a short day hike, to which he invited along a friend. This would be little day trip, reminiscent of the road trips I started taking back in high school, just an hour’s drive out of town and it would feel far away, as if you were really somewhere different, but you could still get back in time to resume your regular life the next day, and not be mired down by mounds of laundry. Friends getting away, for some not-too-important destination, as really it was being on the road, planning the excursion, fueling our adventuresome spirits with possibility (and McDonald’s fries), our minds and bodies soaring with the delectable release from the usual.
I chose the closest of the three trails I’d researched – all had easy elevations, waterfalls, and were within an hour’s drive – the trifecta of successful day trips with youngsters. I chose the closest one, a mere 13 miles out of town, which would still feel like a road trip but was close enough we could miss the Friday rush hour traffic on our return. This was also a destination that was only moderately of interest to me, but because it’s a trail that follows an old railroad road and sits atop a former coal mine, complete with a view down an old coal mining shaft, I had a sense the two ten-year-olds would be intrigued.
They were well beyond intrigued, and off into “awesome” within minutes of being there. They stopped every few feet to pick up amazing specimens of coal, and filled both their backpacks with it. Each time one would find a new piece of coal, the other would admire it. My son decided he wanted to be the “Coal Cart” and it was his backpack that got filled first. Coal sightings were surpassed only by the sighting of slugs and beetles, and one monarch butterfly caterpillar. We ate our picnic lunch, told stories, took some pictures, and mainly looked at coal. I lay back on the picnic blanket and looked at the sky, took some photos of the leaf canopy, and told them the one life lesson for the day: lots of times people spend so much time looking down that they forget to look up. So up they looked, too, admiring the canopy of leaves and the solid gray sky.
They had walking sticks, backpacks, enthusiasm and the sense that they were out exploring the wilderness, intent on making the hike as cool as they could for one another. They enjoyed the bridges, the small waterfall, the creek. Off the trail to one side one boy would go, searching out an amazing, cool thing to show the other; the next time the other boy would take the lead, heading off the trail on the other side. I spent much of the time either ahead of them or behind them, as I didn’t want to interrupt the double helix of exploration and wonder they were weaving for themselves as they criss-crossed the trail over and over again.
We turned around without making it to the end of the hike – they were getting tired and I didn’t want them exhausted, just spent. Back we went, making jokes about fat slugs (“sluggimous pudgimous” was the Latin name we came up with for them), stopping each time to see if it was the same slug we’d passed on our way in (yes, I know what that sounds like, but that’s what we did).
The day was exactly what I hoped it would be, a fun adventure that worked for two 10-year-olds and a sentimental, middle-aged Mom at the helm, creating meaningful memories for all of us. Because, after all, that’s the thing.