Poetical takes a vacation

Late summer blues - or is that blahs? - plus a poem about driving with my son

This egret is enjoying the heat more than me.

Happy steamy summer morning, Substack friends. August has rolled in with a fug of swampy air and excruciatingly high temps. I am not pleased.

Having grown up with two teachers as parents, August always feels like it has a particular import. We would return from the rental on the lake and in some ways it felt like summer was already over. The garden would be bursting with vegetables that needed picking, and weeds that needed pulling. We would start shopping for school supplies and new shoes, and toward the end of the month my mother would start spending a few hours in her classroom every couple of days.

My mom always grieved the end of summer. I could feel her resistance to loosing the freedom of long hot days with no lessons to plan or papers to grade. Meanwhile I was anxious for an end to the heat, and despite not always being the most successful or enthusiastic student, September felt like a new beginning, a fresh start. It still does, much more so to me than the New Year in January.

September may be time for a fresh notebook and a brand new pen, but August is a time to prepare for transitions. To make a list of things you wanted to do this summer but haven’t gotten to yet. We’re making that list as a family right now. There are some local sites we haven’t been to in a while and would like to revisit, there is a deficit of s’mores we need catch up on, a few more minor league ballgames. My son has been working on his college campus this summer and is planning a longer trip home in the coming weeks. Family time is calling.

I’m giving myself permission to take a couple of weeks off from posting a poem here. I may pop into notes, or surprise myself and you with a post. But I’m taking August easy this year, getting ready for next new beginning. I’ll leave you with a poem I wrote a few years ago about my boy who I’m thinking about this morning and can’t wait to see.

Enjoy these last weeks of summer, if you’re in that frame of mind. Or if you’re like me, make yourself a little countdown of days until the weather starts to cool off and it’s time to jump into something new.

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Driving Lessons 

My son is learning to drive.
At sixteen he stores in his head
the date on which he will be eligible
to take his driving test. He gives me
updates, as though I want them.
Thirty days, less than a month,
twenty two days until...
Maybe, I say. Maybe? he asks.
Convince me, I say. Can I drive? he asks.
So we drive together. We drive in snowfall
and rain, at night, in fog, on icy roads,
on cobblestones and dirt tracks.
Big hands on the steering wheel,
his long frame folded into the seat
where his father often sits,
so alike I forget sometimes
who is driving. And as the ease
comes to this action and his mind
unspools the way all our minds do
when we drive, we start to talk,
to wonder at things we see.
At a country traffic light one night,
the red halting us for no one’s safe
passage, he says, Isn’t it funny?
All these traffic lights, just
hanging there, changing from red to
green and back again? Even when
there are no cars around. We look up
together at our light, chins tilting up,
heads tipped to the side at the same
angle. Are they lonely? I wonder aloud,
as the light changes to green and we roll ahead.
Or maybe, I say, they appreciate the quiet.
You should write a poem about that, he says. 

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Thanks for being here, everyone! I’ll be back soon.