Back through the Looking Glass

It is 6:12pm on the Sunday night before the week of the first day of school (which is actually not until Tuesday, thankfully.) The lingering heat from the day is still enough to be just a few degrees more than a warm summer night comfortably requires, but the knowledge that summer nights are far too few, in the grand scheme of things, makes me seek it out, anyway. There is a bee poking around, landing uneasily close to my bare feet, to my drink, buzzing within vibration of my ear, because warm summer nights always have both the enveloping warmth and the reminder that nothing is quite as superlative as our own imaginings.

School always starts earlier than you think it would or should, based on all the summer cues around us. Last year, it started two weeks later than slated, a futile offering on the altar of re-acquiring our normal, just on the other side of “maybe” and “what if.” And after two extra weeks, and no real change to any unknowns, school started back with a remote/in-person masked hybrid that we were almost used to, but not quite.

This past week, when we picked up schedules and tested locker combinations and met teachers and mapped classroom routes, we ran into one of Eva’s favorite teachers from last year, who gave her a hug and asked about her summer and her new schedule and how she’s been. As we walked away, Eva said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen what her smile looks like in person.” This teacher who was instrumental in Eva’s best scholastic year to date. Who sang her praises as a good, kind human and made her feel seen and appreciated in the hard-knock world of middle schooling. Who worked hard to make sure that Eva was set up on a solid path for the future. But whom Eva had never seen smile, in person… I have to stop and sigh a little. This. This is Covid, abridged.

On Tuesday, we go back to school on schedule. In person and five days a week (should we not be pacing ourselves after all we’ve been through??). And the first holiday is not for weeks. Weeks! Four of them, in fact.

When asked whether they are ready to go back to school, my oldest shrugs. My youngest says, “I’m ready. I like routine.” I went back to work in person full time at the beginning of March, so in some ways, I’ve been back to it. I wear work clothes again. And make-up and heels and leave in the morning often before the time I was even getting myself out of bed in those weird, dark winter days when my dining room table was my whole world. But it feels like we are still so unsettled. We’re trying on a routine, pantomiming the actions of the people we were, but still standing on the edge of an unknown, wondering, What if, like a drummer’s tattoo. Fall break. Maybe. The holidays? If… then… for sure. Unless. But otherwise, yes, absolutely.

My boyfriend’s daughter and her husband came to visit last month, a visit long delayed, supplemented by calls and texts and opening presents via video. My parents are coming next month and I honestly just want to sit in the same room that they are in and eat at the same table and share old jokes and know that time and distance are only time and distance, after all, and powerless against deep-rooted family bonds.

Everything seems so much more indelibly significant and yet also like a series of Polaroid photos, snapped in a moment we can’t be sure of until we can look back. I met my best friend’s daughter approximately 15 months after the obvious timeline would have suggested. She was born 18 months ago, in January 2020. Planning to give the new family a little space to find their new footing, I figured I’d hop a plane and visit in the spring. In January 2020, it made complete sense. And now she’s walking and talking and doing puzzles and eating her own red peppers and salmon for dinner, and it seems crazy that in the time I was at my dining room table, this tiny baby became a small human who can befriend rollie pollie bugs during a garden exploration.

Time is relative, and yet so formidably fixed. This week, this second week of August, all my accounts and apps offer up memories of first days of school in years past. Google photos and Facebook and Instagram and Shutterfly. On this Day. We hope you enjoy looking back… And the similarities are as pronounced as the differences. The photos with new backpacks in front of the first-day-photo tree. Tan legs and sun-lightened hair. But so much change in the children themselves.

Now I have an 8^th grader and a 10^th grader, and I have no idea what the year ahead will hold for them. I have fewer answers than ever, and I never had a monopoly on them. I hope our maybes and what ifs all become the routine that Eva is looking for. But I think we’ve all seen the other side of the looking glass now, so it’s hard to say if we’ll ever be quite the same again.

But even so, in a couple days, we’ll wake up early, stand in front of the first-day-of-school photo tree, and start the next thing. And we have these summer nights.