Feeling Every Moment

Early Sunday morning, we will load up the car and drive JT north to start pre-season practice for his first season of Cross Country at Springfield College.  On September 4, he’ll start classes there while I will go to the first day of school here at home.  

For the first time in 14 years, we won’t be at the same school.  For years, I worked at school with the daily prospect that I would see my boy…..walking across campus with his fellow pre-K classmates, running to the gym for PE, or in the lunchroom with his friends.  I have loved these years and while I’m excited for the both of us to start this next chapter, as each day of August closes, this beautiful passage from Ru by Kim Thúy echoes in my mind, “I never had any questions except the one about the moment when I could die.   I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I’ve lost the option of dying.  The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I have to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek.  My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth, to be a fairy.  A fairy smitten with the way they smell.”