TURN, TURN, TURN
On pockets of time, the changing of seasons, and walking naked down the road.
Hi team. Enjoy these late summer musings. Thank you for reading Resilience, and for being here, however it works for you. May you find peace in the interstices, the liminal spaces, the late summer days. I’m excited for a jam packed fall, including offerings here on Substack. In the meantime, here is a piece of my end of August heart! xx Alexa
There are pockets of time, seasons.
Like the winter I nannied for the father whose wife had just left him. I’d take his son to the Pakistani Tea House, where we’d eat fragrant street food among the taxi drivers, teenagers, and throngs of local law students. That winter, my life revolved around a grey, sunless strip of Tribeca. The wind from the Hudson River chilled me to the bone as I ran from the C train to PS 89, stopping at Bazzini on Greenwich Street for a bag of roasted peanuts for us to share. The child and I didn’t have much of a connection; he didn’t really talk to me. After all, his mother had run off with the tennis coach. But at night, when I’d tuck him in, I’d kiss his head, taking in the scents of cardamom and cumin from dinner, and that salty little boy smell I had no idea I’d come to know so well ten years later.
The last weeks of summer are pockets unto themselves. Temporary routines, or no routines at all.
'The days are long, but the years are short,' someone said to me once.
'Don’t say that to a cancer mom,' I wanted to bark back.
It’s amazing to me how we can make form out of nothing. How we can give our days structure, only to collapse and start again.
Once, before children, a group of us spent the last weeks of summer in Vermont. There seemed to be a sense among us that this would be the last time, as adults, we’d be able to take off like that. Our days revolved around what time we’d go to the lake and what we’d make for dinner. I can still see us marching along the side of the road with our floaties and plastic rafts bought at Buxton’s, the General Store. One night, we walked down the country road in the dark. I thought it would be funny to take our clothes off, but this upset my friend’s girlfriend. It was a thoughtless thing to do, and I still wonder why I did it.
But it was a pocket of time, a slice.
Sometimes, when I’m driving down 9G, marveling, always, at how I, such a city girl, ended up in the country, I think back to the younger me, standing outside PS 89 with her peanuts, chilled to the bone in her winter coat bought on sale at Bloomingdale’s.
My friend, R., and I would always buy our winter coats at the annual sale. She’s quite famous now. I haven’t stepped inside Bloomingdale’s since. But what a season that was, running with our 100 dollars made in tips from last night’s show to snag our wool coat for yet another cruel city winter.
Pockets of time are seasons. Turn, turn, turn, I sing along with the oldies station, clutching the coats of winters past, the cardamom, the cumin, the salt, the chill from the river, the country road at night.
There is so much yet to come.
A MEDITATION
May I keep turning, like the seasons.
Sending love to you, in whatever pocket of time you find yourselves in.
Feel free to share pockets of your own. Tell me of your seasons, or how the past is interwoven with the present, and how it all just meshes together…
Thank you for reading, and for supporting my work. Keep going!
xx Alexa