The dying whine of student activity pushed far past the brink can only mean one thing: My semester is cycling to an end. They start out so energized and eager, but 16 weeks later the energy is a fragmented pulse of protons with no real electrons to chase. This brief peace is forfeited by the understanding that the end to my semester marks the nearing end to my kids school year. Here in the desert that means wading into public pools and trying, quite desperately, to find an inch of shade on a 120 degree afternoon.
I don’t laud it.
Perhaps the best time of it all is the in-between when I can rise early with the kids, feed them, play with them, and then still send them of to school. In this green patch of days I find the hours to write and to clean and to clean more when I ought to be writing. Video games are rediscovered. Love is given proper time to bloom. In the space of a few weeks a person can catch up to himself. In the space of a few days I settle into a new routine, if only for a moment before the summer routine fully has me, and I think of what a life I direct looks like. Then I recognize how little I direct my life and it makes me sad. That frown is followed by promises, plans written on the back of napkins, whispered strategies over bottles of wine keeping time with the cadence of rebellion. I glimpse another in-between as the summer closes and the kids return to the classroom and I can breathe shallow until my school year starts anew. I think about what I can be, and then I fall back into who I am.