Back To School

There they go again. Lunches and backpacks for their drop out of the mother ship. And there goes a daughter in a new dress and a son up before the dawn. The last one lines up with her new class. And we go about our daily routine. Another day but it does mark summers end doesn't it even though summer goes to the twenty first of September. And even on the bike ride you can hear the corn rustling now and the air has the dry feel of empty husks..the smell of harvest.

And we turn into another year while they greet new schoolmates and renew old friendships. The new teacher could be good or bad. The new desk is something to get used too and summer still yawns out that slit window open to the returning heat. Because summer does come back on the first day of school. It is part of the ritual. A cool summer then blazing heat for those first months of children stuck inside cinder block forts. If only the heat had come earlier.

And you think of all the things you wanted to do with your kids. You did some of them. Went to a ballgame. The pool. Vacation. But you worked a lot and you wonder if you should have spent more time with them while they were home. Because they are not now. They have left like the soon departing summer... and autumn is closing in.

The Pitcher...what a mom won't do for her sons dream

 

Writing in summer

The Russian winter is gone  in Chicago and for writers this is a jolt. Happily ensconced in coffee houses you go about your business and assume the winter will drag on for at least another couple of months as we don't have spring in Chicago. We have wet soggy snow and dreary cold windy days that drag into June and then it gets hot. But now because of some kind of strange weather pattern we are in summer! And all those winter rhythms so conducive to writing the big Russian novels that require plodding and fires and lots and lots of coffee has been replaced by the airy days of summer. Bizarre.

And so you emerge bleary eyed after months of hacking away in your garret. Winter is enforced isolation as summer is enforced expulsion into the great outdoors of sunshine and air, peering strangely at the sky you have not seen except as a glaring cold ball of fire low on the horizon where night comes early and you pass the night in front of the television or the computer or with a book and rise to cold dark days that put you back in the coffee house and it is very good for the work. Summer...not so much.

You want to be outside man! Work. What work? Time to frolic. You are the school kid staring out the window and longing for the sunshine except you are now your own master and go on outside because the only taskmaster is yourself and he can be bribed very easily with promises of a bike ride or ice cream or just sitting on the porch with the laptop. The work moves into the background as all that Vitamin D pumps through your poor sun starved body and you find yourself waking up after a long hibernation. Could you really be that white and fat?YES!

So this lasts for the first week of the warm weather and that epic novel sits. Yeah you work on it but it is different. One foot in and one foot out the door at the Dairy Queen or throwing a football with the kids or wandering around the yard or garage and feeling like you should be doing something very active outside, but you have no idea what. Best to make some notes and tuck the novel while you lose your mind to the summer sun. At least until it rains.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Summer Has Ended

Our kids are going back to school now. They have all collected at their bus stops and marched off leaving their turtles and dogs and cats and chalk and bikes and tricycles and bathing suits and goggles behind. They have left their friendly garages scrawled with stick men and names on the cool cement that smells of gas and bikes and grass. They no longer go barefoot in the yard and listen to the crickets and run after the fireflies and catch bugs in a jar. They are no longer roasting marshmallows and getting chocolate on their hands and tracking in dirt or letting the wet dog in for the hundredth time.

We are no longer lighting charcoal and eating with them on our patios or decks or on that broken picnic table. They are not inside on the hot days watching television for hours. They aren't taking that sweaty bike ride with their parents that ends up at the ice cream store. Their paper plates are no where to be found. Their cups of Kool Aide are empty. They aren't siting around a  table at the Dairy Queen on a warm summer night with ice cream dripping all over their hands. Their rooms are not perpetually a wreck with wet suits and clothes stacked up from the week. They are not coming back from summer camp with mosquito bites and warm brows. Their books and their IPODS and their computers and their dolls and their basketballs, baseballs, footballs, lacrosse sticks, mitts, all lay dormant now.

For summer has ended even though it is still August. They have lined up for their yellow buses and waved goodbye to parents who snapped pictures and waved and shouted and then tried to catch a glimpse of them as they rode away in disel exhaust for eight hours. We return to our homes, our work. It is quiet. We go through our days. We make our money and work out and run through the TO DO lists of our lives. But in the unguarded moment we are heartbroken.

Summer has ended and our children have gone away.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle The story of a one mans search for the American Dream