Seasons Change

I am not a minimalist. I sit pecking out words at a desk hemmed in by a hundred little shreds of paper attached to a hundred vivid memories. Pieces of my life, tethered to my heart, and taped to the wall to remind me of where I’ve been and of where I’m going.

Pages ripped from my favorite book, a stub from Gusta Pizza in Florence where my husband and I ate again and again during our week there, the words of a cherished poem to remind me of my childhood in the prairies. The stories of our lives strung together day after day after day… and remembered by a hundred shreds of paper hanging from the wall.

We aren’t always conscious of the story we’re writing with all these strung-together days of a life. So many, many days are almost exactly the same, and we get lost at sea in the living of it.

Then, something changes, and we are jolted awake. Are we not all quite awake after 2020? Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll ever really rest again.

For years, my season of life was MOTHERHOOD. All day, every day (and through many nights, too) I mom-ed, and mom-ed, and mom-ed. I very much got lost at sea in the sameness of it all. It was a season that would never end, and certainly, I’d never sleep again.

And then one day, I woke up and the seasons had changed. My children were both in school and I was back at work. And while I still mom very hard and still don’t always sleep through the night, I know without a doubt that what was ended and something new began.

I look back on my early days of motherhood and marvel at their passing. How many times did an older mom say, “it goes so fast.” It does and it doesn’t. Those years were long and hard. And yet, now that they’re behind me, I feel those older-mom words burning a hole in my retrospective heart — it goes so fast.

It is not just motherhood that has me nostalgic. I see the passing of time everywhere these days. In the thirteen years of marriage my husband and I celebrated this summer, in the changing and aging of our parents, in the babies I babysat having babies.

Time marches on and on. We can’t stop it. So, may we live awake rather than lost at sea. May we notice, and cherish, and tape to our hearts the moments we’re given. No matter how it looks today, for better or worse, seasons change.