One Hundred Days of Harvest
As the summer winds down, we can’t help but take a moment to hold fast to this last week before it disappears behind us. The next time we turn around, a different summer will be fading into autumn — and another and another — pulled by this long yet swiftly shifting journey.
The return of the school year always marks a lot of significance. The harvest season begins. The younger generations advance in their graded levels. The daylight fades. Every college town I ever lived in laments the uptick in traffic time. Every year.
Some may not feel the importance in marking time’s passage, but if we don’t, well, time passes anyway. Time doesn’t care. Either we acknowledge change or we don’t — but change happens whether we give it meaning or not.
It isn’t easy to acknowledge that time passes, that some things will forever be behind us. We don’t always want to give meaning to the fact that someone is gone or a phase of life is over. When we don’t want to give time’s passage any meaning it’s usually because the only meaning we feel we can give it, right now (or maybe forever), is something negative. Whatever it is comes with too much grief to want to give it any voice.
But, whether we voice that grief or sadness or not, time passes anyway. Might as well say, “I’m going to miss this,” as it passes through instead of knotting it up and carrying it around, silently ruining many summers to come with some unnamed, underlying disappointment.
I’m going to miss this summer more than any summer I’ve ever lived, and I’ve been waiting to say that till now, six days before I return to work. We are going to miss the time we had this summer with our little family, pure and ripe and full of possibilities. Last summer was festive with all its travels, and I certainly held onto that high summer as it faded, but this summer was more than festive…this summer was visionary.
So, now, we have a choice. After acknowledging the waning daylight of these beautiful months (literally and figuratively), we can choose to stare, listless, at our golden fields just watching them wither away until winter or we can harvest.
That’s what we have to do — and we don’t stop with today. The harvest season is many months long. We can collect on the glories of this summer for more than a hundred days. This is the season where we draw upon our memories for mental fortitude when the steep yet inevitable fall from summer heights takes its toll….
For us, that toll will most likely take the form of increased sleep deprivation and the painful physics of that unnatural distance — like magnets held apart — which parents experience away from their babies.
I will be one very tired, charged-up little magnet of a person by the winter solstice.
Or, at least, I hope to be — because that just means that our baby is getting bigger, growing older and more aware, more demanding — and we are alive (60% caffeine instead of water, but alive) and working and ambitious and creative and full of human emotion — (all emotions, not just the good ones!) — and still young enough to at least try to do it all.
And, in the end, the busy harvests are temporary, too — last fall was one that seems like a million years ago already — and we’ll look back at them fondly just as we look back at the happy summers. Even this past spring was full of winter-type worries, and that was temporary — and we can look back at those 56 days in the NICU and be grateful for those first lessons in exhaustion and magnetic separation.
We have learned and loved and lived a lot this year and that kind of sowing makes for a very plentiful harvest, one can only hope!
