Off Again

It’s my last Sunday afternoon at home before I take off on a month-long voyage abroad.  These adventures have become a bit of a routine – I haven’t had a summer without an extended solo trip overseas in six years.  I woke up this morning with what has become the familiar pre-trip feeling: so excited about the adventures ahead, but a frightening and frantic need to peel back the sheets to embrace the family I will soon leave.  The chaotic urgency of my need to love them is oddly silenced the moment I actually see a member of my family, the same way a huge horse can soar across a pasture in a frolicking, bucking gallop and bounce to an instant halt with its forelegs just inches from the fence.  I instantly default to playing it cool, often erring even on the side of appearing distant.  And yet my entire chest cavity seems to swim with heat and tightness as I deliver an intentionally half-hearted good morning hug, ensuring that I guard the terrible, shameful secret that my heart is breaking with love and longing. 

 

Right now I am sitting on one of the loungers by the pool in the backyard.  It’s 75 degrees outside, cool breeze blowing, ambient noise of water flowing around in the pool, occasionally the lazy and distant chug of a radial airplane engine traversing our sky space.  My brother is on the lounger next to me going through a test prep book for the entrance exam into the National Guard.  My dad is on a chair behind us (he recently crossed over to that side to follow the sliding shade from the umbrella) reading Steve Forbes’ new book that compares modern corporations to great empires throughout history (I gave it to Ian for his birthday, and dad – who reads about 50 pages a minute – swiped it up first, as he often does).  The cat is crashed out in the shady grass next to him, lying on his back with his white fluffy cat-tummy bared to the breezes.  There’s a pile of silenced iPhones and Blackberries on the table between the three of us, as well as small silver trays with empty dishes from brunch.

 

Ian just stood up and said, “Will you be sad if I go sit at the table?”  The table is about 15 feet away.  I smile and answer, “Of course not.”  But it does make me sad when he goes and the chair beside me is now empty.  I swallow it, however – I think my impending voyage for a month-long stint in the Middle East divests me of my right to keep him from his 15-foot displacement for the next half hour.  But I miss him somehow as I look over at his deeply concentrated little face over there. 

 

My mom and I spent a lovely morning together in quiet and easy conversation, intermittently confessing shy sentiments of contentment to one another.  We were geographically located in the epicenter of six or seven unfinished remodeling projects and countless others that had yet to be tackled.  We’ve had upwards of twenty people come out to give an estimate on the kitchen remodel we keep putting off.  I was sitting on a little sofa mother happened upon one day at the Jewish women’s charity thrift shop on Wilshire one day – it was used as patio furniture on the porch of the house I lived in my senior year of college and had settled in our breakfast nook when I moved back home after graduation.  Not the piece we imagined for so prominent a place in our home, but mother expresses our sentiments perfectly when she sits there with her laptop and a cup of coffee and pretends she’s on a cruise ship looking out at the backyard through the window next to her.  It’s a great little sofa. 

 

Mom says it well when she exclaims that we are “cursed with contentment.”

 

It has been a recent struggle of mine to try to examine the meaning of the phrase “full of life.”  Because of the fullness of the relationship I have with Him, I am satisfied to count the phrase “full in Christ” a synonym.  But to explore that, to give it gravity by giving it words – ah, I am inept. 

 

I look at it this way: here I sit in the same backyard I’ve sat in since I was thirteen.  From my vantage point, I see the patio table, the pool slide we were never really young enough to enjoy in this house, the now-empty flowerbed I once labored for an entire summer to fill with blossoms, and the back of our house.  As I take in the scene, my muscles twitch with the desire to dance about, swiping a mental butterfly net this way and that in an effort to capture and bottle all the memories that linger in the atmosphere of this 1/8 of an acre.  I can watch the countless backyard dinner parties like a movie montage, in addition to many anguish-wrought nights writing by candlelight at the table or in the wrought iron chairs by the ivy covered wall.  I watch myself finishing Somerset Maugham novels, flipping through Vogue, sitting in the middle of the line of all the cousins at my grandmother’s memorial service, refilling the punch bowl at my brother’s Eagle Scout ceremony, coming downstairs for lavish brunches (nobody can pull these together like Judith Whittinghill) on special or just normal Saturdays.  I can spread my arms wide and splay my fingers and somehow grab the jasmine-scented air, pulling downward and wrapping it around me like a blanket. 

 

These long summer sits in the backyard are like jumping on a trampoline.  Usually they are the scenes of dreaming, planning, building, preparing – altogether springing up and out.  But every once in a while, my bounce matches up with my fellow jumpers’ bounces just right (they have changed nothing about their bouncing pattern to bring this about), and instead of soaring up over the rooftops my knees buckle and I’m sucked into the floor with black-hole strength gravity.  I land softly, cushioned and cradled, and all upward and outward momentum is, for a millisecond, sucked out of me completely.  And then I am content, filled to overflowing with the fullness of life as I take a little break from the jumping, lying on my back as the trampoline settles to stillness and looking up at the sky.  I see that I do these adventures because I do them, not because I need them or because I am searching for something.  This little house here is teeming with life – it’s a wonder the roofbeams can contain it.  It drips out of the windows, pours out the front door.  It is life and life abundantly.  It is love that both cradles and launches, love that simultaneously crushes your heart inward like an empty coke can and bursts forth in an explosion.  Love that forgives, hopes, gives, and does not fear.  Oh, how content am I.