Nine years ago Saturday, Steve and Jack and I drove into the woods of western Maine for our first Parents Day at Camp Encore/Coda.  We took our seats in the dimness of an old post-and-beam barn on the shores of a quiet pond, and watched our son Henry play jazz keyboards for the first time in his life.  The song was Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.”  He took a little solo, glanced out to where we sat in the audience, and flashed us a grin.  

Music camp had been my idea, not his. Three weeks earlier, we’d delivered our boy into the hands of a couple of friendly college students, who promised him a fine time in Starfish cabin.  And then we hugged him good-bye and left him there, shy and frightened, with a nervous stomach ache and a black trunk full of carefully labeled shorts and tee-shirts, pre-addressed and stamped envelopes for letters home, bug spray and sweatshirts and music books.  As we pulled out onto the dirt road beyond the parking lot, I realized that my own stomach felt kind of queasy.  And I wondered if, in my desire to expand our son’s world and build his confidence, I’d perhaps pushed a little too hard and a little too soon.  It wasn’t until we returned and saw him standing on the corner of the Old Music Hall stage, holding his own in a jazz band comprised of a bunch of other eleven-year-old kids, a look of pure joy on his face, that I knew for sure:  painful as it had been to insist that our boy leave home for the first time in his life, the journey now belonged to him. 

Jump forward nine years.  It is Saturday, and I am in the audience at Parent’s Day again.  My son is a senior counselor, with piano students of his own to teach, a jazz workshop to lead, concerts to perform and camp musicals to play.  The memories come rushing back as I sit in the old barn -- all the years we have returned to this camp that both of our sons came, in their own turn, to love.  All the times we’ve gone through the very same ritual, arriving at the gate early on a mid-summer morning, parking the car in a freshly mown field,  following the signs into camp, eyes peeled for one of our boys.  How strange, and perfectly wonderful it always was, to sit in a shed in the deep woods of Maine, listening to children and teenagers and adults all making music together.  A handful of young string musicians performing the Brandenburg concertos with exquisite nuance.  A group of kids in shorts and t-shirts, intently focused on their conductor as they sing Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”  in pure six-part harmony. A big band comprised of musicians whose average age is fourteen, swinging through intricate jazz arrangements with the panache and creativity of pros.  

It’s been four years since Henry’s last sumer here, when he spent seven weeks working his tail off as a CIT.  Three years since Jack played lead guitar in the Zappa Rock Band. Camp vanished all too quickly in life’s rearview mirror, another part of childhood that had been lived and loved and left behind.  And so, part of what gives rise to so much emotion on this particular morning is my own sharp awareness of time passing. It is not exactly jealousy I feel, as I watch a new generation of parents greeting their children, exclaiming over summer tans, growth spurts, and shaggy hair.  I had my turn.  And yet I am overcome, as I walk up the familiar path and hear the sound of a solitary violin being tuned in a practice cabin, both with gratitude for this unexpected homecoming and, at the same time, with a profound, heart-breaking sense of how much is already over.

My challenge now -- as it seems to be every day this summer -- is to release my hold on what was, so that I can be grateful and at peace with what is.  How well I remember the acute, visceral joy of these reunions.  But there is a different joy awaiting me here now, if I can only allow myself to feel it.  Not the joy of bringing a much-missed child home at the end of the weekend, but rather the joy of being a mother who has done her job, and is now being offered an opportunity to catch a glimpse of her grown-up son doing his.

And the fact is, it did take a full sixteen hours to drive to Maine last week, pick up Henry, drive to a dock on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee, meet the kindly orthodontist who was willing to see my son right on his boat, drive back to Maine, drop Henry off in the woods,  turn around and drive home.  

I assured Jack that if he wanted to accept an invitation to be an apprentice to a brilliant physical trainer this summer, we’d figure out a way to make it work.  This despite the fact that his program runs from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Thursday, and we live two hours away from the studio in downtown Boston where Jack is getting a crash course in anatomy, body work, Chinese meridians, flexibility, resistance stretching, and personality types. 

And yes, making it work has meant house-sitting for three weeks in our old neighborhood, and then scrambling among friends to find unused beds and spare keys, parking permits and welcome mats. But the thing I realized this morning, as I awoke on a sway-backed pull-out couch in a friend’s borrowed Harvard Square apartment, is that I will never again be called upon to perform the jobs I’m doing these days--acting as chauffeur and room mate to my two sons.  The braces will come off at last.  We will break down and get another car.  Apartments will be sublet for summer jobs.  The kids will find their own way.  

In fact, both of them are really doing that already.  All I’m providing here is a helping hand, easing the logistics in enterprises that are very much their own doing.  I guess that’s why, despite a few inconveniences,  I feel grateful to be needed, and why I am treasuring every moment of this unusually rootless summer.  Why a lobster roll on the dock and a few hours with Henry in the car was reward enough for the long drive to Maine and back.  Why every game of Bananagrams or early morning conversation or stroll through Harvard Square with Jack feels special.  Why I don’t mind at all the fact that I am living out of an L. L. Bean bag in Cambridge this week, instead of at home in my own house.  

Soon enough, this summer will end.  The only thing I know for sure about next summer is that it will be different.  And so I say “yes” to really long drives, to strange beds, and to doing what ever it takes to make things work for right now.  

Sated, we ride through town to the pond, park the bikes, peel off shorts and sweaty tee shirts, swim out.  Dark deep water, the silvered reflection of clouds on the still surface, the rim of trees along the far shore.   Floating on my back, suspended in stillness with my face turned to the sun, I know exactly where I am:  awake to this one moment of pure awareness.  Inhabiting the impeccable, ephemeral present.   

Later, by the white light of the computer, I read a friend’s email. This time, her chemo isn’t working.  

All night I lie awake in bed, staring at a shadow on the ceiling and thinking about miracles.  Who gets one? I wonder. And in the morning, I take books from the shelf, in search of a poem I read years ago, foretelling the future.

Otherwise

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been 

otherwise.  I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candsticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day. 

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise. 

                   --Jane Kenyon

It was sweltering hot, and no one was happy. The tiny, uninsulated upstairs bedrooms were unbearable.   We plugged fans into every available 1923 wall outlet, then crossed our fingers and prayed we wouldn’t blow out the ancient wiring.  But it didn’t help; the effect was more convection oven than cross breeze.  

Desperation inspired us to have our first party in our new house--we needed something to distract us from the mold, the carpenter ants, the bats, the heat, the sleepless nights, and our overwhelming sense of buyer’s remorse.  It didn’t make much sense to sit around in the small airless house; the view across the field to the mountains was the real draw anyway.  And so I picked a spot out there, dug a little clearing and rimmed it with rocks, and stacked a few logs in the center.  

That night there were just a handful of us--Steve and the boys and me, three of our friends--sitting by the fire, watching the sparks spiral up into the darkness as fireflies danced through the tall grass beyond.  It was nothing short of magical, a peaceful moment of deliverance after a long, sweaty, terrible week when every member of my family wished nothing more than to roll back the clock, do it all over again, and stay put -- in our old suburban life in our familiar, comfortable, well-ventilated house.  

What I remember most clearly about sitting by the fire that early summer night was the feeling--well, perhaps it was really just more of a hope--that at long last we were taking the first step into what we would come to love in our NEW life.  Surely, I believed then, we would have many more such evenings --  bonfires on the hilltop, easy, impromptu parties, countless reasons to gather our friends together to share food and laughter and to celebrate life’s simple pleasures.  In short order that summer, we pulled together a solstice party, a Father’s Day brunch, a birthday, a cookout on the 4th of July, a few pre-theatre suppers in honor of our new proximity to the summer stock playhouse a mile up the road, various other spontaneous get-togethers.  

And then, reality set in.  Summer came to an end, cold weather arrived, and we began the long, exhausting, and expensive project of moving out of the cottage, tearing it down, designing a new house, getting it built, choosing paint and fixtures, moving again, unpacking, settling in.  It all took so much longer than we ever imagined it would.  Meanwhile, the kids grew up and life got complicated.  The party we meant to have when the house was finally finished, months later than anticipated, never happened.  I think we were just too wiped out to think about one more project. 

Five years passed before we had another party on that hilltop, Steve’s 60th birthday last June.  I was so out of practice that I planned and obsessed for weeks, wondering where people would sit, how many bottles of wine to buy and how many chairs to borrow, whether we should rearrange all the furniture, rent a table, get a new grill.  It rained for days before, it rained on the day of, and it rained for a week after. That night, people stood up to eat.  We squeezed into the kitchen, clustered in the living room, managed to have a fine time despite the weather.  But the idea of heading outside, or trying to get a fire going, never entered my mind.  

This year, the Fourth of July fireworks were scheduled for Monday night, at the high school just down the hill and across the valley from us--which means that the best view in town is from our hilltop.  It’s been months since we’ve had more than four people at our dinner table, and more than a year since that rainy birthday celebration.  The fire pit that I was certain would be the center of countless memorable gatherings hasn’t been used, not even once, since our very first summer here, when it seemed-- for a few weeks anyway-- to be at the very center of our life.   

Clearly, it was time.  So, last week I fired off a few e-mails and made a few calls:  Come over for a potluck dinner and fireworks.  It used to be that such an invitation would always include the line “Bring the kids.”  These days, of course, the kids drive themselves and whether they’ll actually show up is by no means a given. 

But the word went out, and I wrote a to-do list, went food shopping, and hoped for a crowd.  Jack and a friend spent a sweaty couple of hours digging out the old, overgrown fire pit, making it bigger and better than ever.  They laid an ambitious fire, stacked enough wood for a long night of revelry, and arranged all the benches and chairs we have into a semicircle.  They set up the badminton net, at my insistence.  Just in case. 

And as it happened, we lucked out.  Teenagers, parents, old friends and new ones--they all came.  The table filled with food--salads and watermelon and pasta. Steaks and chicken and hamburgers and hot dogs arrived for the grill.  Coolers were carried in to the kitchen and deposited.  “Thank you,” Jack said to me in passing, “for having some normal food here.”  (He meant the Coke and ginger ale and corn chips and bottled salsa that I usually refuse to buy. But at a certain point, well, what you really want is for everyone present to feel happy and well fed.)  

There was a  moment, a kind of Mrs. Dalloway moment, when I just stopped, stock still, and looked around at the loveliness of the scene.  The men were in the kitchen, drinking beer.  The women were outside, chatting.  The boys were juggling--a skill they all learned together in sixth and seventh grade and suddenly, spontaneously, decided to revive at ages seventeen and eighteen.  Clubs flew through the air. A fiercely competitive badminton game was in progress.  A group of girls sat at the picnic table, deep in conversation.  Just a few minutes later, of course, this evanescent bubble would pop and vanish forever.  Steve would carry the first platters in from the grill, the teenagers would troop in to fill their plates, and one tableau would transform itself into another, and another after that.  Dinner served and eaten, talk and laughter, dishes loaded into the dishwasher, cake sliced onto paper plates, darkness falling.  

Jack touched a match to the fire. The fireworks lit up the sky.  We passed the bug spray around and sprawled out across the grass.  Marshmallows were set aflame, s’mores made and devoured.  The last time we did this, my children were still children.  I don’t know why we waited so long to find our way back here, to this ritual we created, loved, and yet abandoned all too easily -- for what?  Lack of time?  Lack of energy?  Lack of belief in the enduring magic of a campfire and friends with whom to share it?

Today, I promise myself this:    More time for fun.  More intergenerational parties, before it’s too late and the younger generation is up and out and gone for good.  More fires outside, more s’mores, more reasons to celebrate the joy of being alive, of raising children to young adulthood, of spending time with those young adults--who, after all, are still learning from us, each and every day, what it means to live a good life.  

Then: my husband’s buzzing cell phone, a relentless caller, Steve finally giving in, disappearing down the hall, returning with news to whisper in my ear.  A car crash, an eighteen-year-old girl dead.  

Two weeks ago, Steve gave the graduation speech at High Mowing, Henry’s alma mater.  Huddled under umbrellas, our family watched as the soaked, exuberant seniors tossed their caps in the air, whooped, and hugged one another before turning to receive congratulations from the crowd.  

How quickly a moment turns upon itself, from joy to grief, from light to dark, from life to death.  How to hold, on the bright summer afternoon of a child’s first birthday, the sudden, senseless death of another child, just coming into her young adulthood?  

You put an arm around your own seventeen-year-old son, pull him close, and give silent thanks for his life.  You say a private, wordless prayer for a family devastated by loss.  You see in your mind’s eye a photograph of a lovely girl with long brown hair, laughing as she danced with her classmates around the May Pole.  You try to understand how it is that such a girl, with all her life to live before her, could so suddenly be gone.  You carry forks and plates out to the porch,  hug your dad, and watch your kid brother, now a father of two, cook the burgers on the grill.  You smile when your sister-in-law sweeps her beautiful children into her arms and kisses their round, fat cheeks, and you choose to spare her the day’s dose of grief.   

All week, I’ve been wondering: how are we meant to do this?  How can we learn to carry both the preciousness of life and the inevitability of death in our hearts at the same time?  At the end of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” Emily, who has died in childbirth, is given the opportunity to return to earth and live one day of her life over again.  She deliberately chooses an ordinary day, her twelfth birthday -- a day of eggs and bacon cooking, sunflowers in the garden, a postcard album from the boy next door, something on the table wrapped in yellow paper that once belonged to her grandmother.  To Emily, now an outsider looking in at the life she once took for granted, every minute detail of this long-since forgotten day is cause for delight and heartbreak.  So clearly does she see the fleeting, ineffable beauty of what is.  So urgent is her wish for connection, meaning, recognition.  But her distracted mother -- rushing around to get breakfast on the table and her children hustled off to school -- is oblivious.  Gently, appealing to her mother to wake up and really see her, Emily implores, “Just for a moment now we’re all together--Mama, just for a moment, let’s be happy.  Let’s look at one another.”

I have read this soliloquy so many times over the years -- never without tears in my eyes -- that I pretty much know it by heart.  And yet, again and again, I have to remind myself:  Just for a moment now, we’re all here.  Just for a moment, let’s be happy.  Let’s look at each other.  

And so on Sunday afternoon, with a  heart full of sadness and confusion and gratitude all mixed up together, I did the best I could.  I looked at our big extended family -- my brother and sister-in-law and all her folks; my petite, feisty niece and my earnest, easy-going nephew, my own dear parents, my husband of twenty-two years, our six-foot-tall son.  When Henry called in from his summer job in Maine, we passed the phone around.  Three-year-old Gabriel ate the first hamburger of his life.  Angelique tolerated her party hat. Plates were filled, food eaten, pink frosted cupcakes handed out to all takers.

“Oh earth,” Emily cries when she can bear the poignance of her visit no longer, “you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you!” Turning to the wise, omniscient Stage Manager, she asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?”

“No,” he says quietly.  And then, “Saints and poets maybe--they do some.”

How I aspire to be one of those poets.  To allow myself to know the ache of sadness, but to remember as well that life offers us good reason in each and every day to be lovestruck. To learn to see by learning to write. To “realize life,” as Emily would say, by truly inhabiting every moment that’s granted me, without ever holding on too tight to what’s already passing, changing, turning into some new, endlessly surprising present.  

Mary Oliver is surely our patron saint and poet both.  Reading her words, I get a sense of what it might mean to let experience flow freely through an open heart, suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.

To live in this world

 you must be able 

to do three things 

to love what is mortal; 

to hold it 

against your bones knowing 

your own life depends on it; 

and, when the time comes to let it go, 

to let it go

Happy first birthday dear Angelique.  Peace be with you dear Abby.  And the world spins on. 

 I’ve had the idea for a while now that these last few years have been all about change, and that my task has been to learn how to deal with it, how to make my peace with the many endings and beginnings that seem to be part and parcel of mid-life.    It’s been years since we moved away from the neighborhood where Henry and Jack grew up. And although we’ve returned for visits with old friends and neighbors, our roots are elsewhere these days. Our boys, eleven and fourteen when they last spent a night in our old house, are now seventeen and twenty, pretty much full-grown.   And our current life in New Hampshire (one son halfway through college, the other finishing high school)  bears no resemblance to the one we left behind (two little boys in the backyard, playing catch until dark).  

The image I’ve had in my mind--of doors closing for good on the past and new ones opening before us--seemed practical and realistic.  Settled now, with a bit of history in our not-so-new house, I’ve come to accept the fact that all children grow up eventually and, in the process, families do change, and sometimes they even move away from cherished places.  Life chapters end. Pages turn.  We acknowledge endings, create new beginnings, yearning all the while for permanence and  security.  

And year by year, as my own family has shaped new rituals and memories in a new place, I’ve struggled to make my fragile peace with Thomas Wolfe’s famous truism, “you can’t go home again.”  (Well, I keep telling myself, you can’t, not in any literal sense. The day you sign those closing papers, the locks get changed and what was once yours no longer is.)  

And yet, lately I’ve experienced one homecoming after another, homecomings at once unexpected, wonderful, and profound. In fact, I am typing these words while sitting on the porch of our former next-door neighbor’s house, gazing across the driveway at our own old green house, solid and quiet and still on this hot summer afternoon.  Plunked back into our old neighborhood --and, in some ways, right back into our old life -- I can’t help but think about homecomings in a more spiritual sense, homecomings that keep reminding me that everything is connected after all, and that although life is always changing, beginnings and endings might be little more than illusions, constructs of our limited human minds that fail to take into account the bigger mystery.    

A few months ago, Jack was invited to participate in a four-days-a-week training program in Boston this summer --long hours, hard work, lots to learn.  “If you really want to do this,” I told him at the time, “I’m sure we can figure out a way to make it work.”  He gave it some thought, and said yes.  And I started looking into summer sublets on Craig’s List and putting out feelers to every friend within fifteen miles of the city.  A few promising leads fizzled.  And then our former next-door neighbors and best friends from across the driveway offered us their house.  They would be in South Africa and could use a house sitter; we were welcome to move in for the month they would be gone.  

And so it was that last Sunday night, Jack and I let ourselves in to the house where he spent some of the happiest hours of his childhood playing with his two best buddies, Nick and Will.  

“This feels pretty weird,” we said in unison, as we flicked on lights and called the cat’s name.  Our friends were halfway across the world by the time we showed up, and neither of us quite knew what to do in their house without them in it, too.  I put some food in the fridge, opened the windows, unpacked my bag, and then tossed and turned all night, feeling like a trespasser in my best friend’s bedroom.  

Jack, veteran of countless sleep overs here and epic games of hide and seek, knows every nook and cranny of this house, but in the morning he told me that he’d had trouble settling down himself.  He was at a bit of a loss,  missing his friend and not quite comfortable sprawled out in Nick’s bed instead of in his usual spot, in a sleeping bag on the floor.

As it turns out, our old house is empty this summer as well, the owners having spent the last year abroad.  And so it’s been all too easy to imagine that, any minute now, we’ll just saunter across the driveway and be at “home” again.  From the outside, everything looks exactly as it did when we lived there. Which means I can fool myself into thinking that, inside, my dishes are stacked in the cupboards as always, our family photos are still on the walls, Steve is working away in his upstairs office, Henry’s picking out tunes on the piano in the living room.  

All during our first day here, I had to remind myself: those weeds in the garden are not mine to pull, the blueberries ripening by the garage, not ours to pick, even if no one else is around to harvest them.  Jack has felt the tug in a different way.  The other night, looking over at our old house as dusk fell, he mused, “If I ever get rich enough to build my own house, I think I’ll make it exactly like this one.  And then it would always feel like I was back home again.”  

Meanwhile, we are making ourselves at home again, right next door.  After a few days in Carol’s kitchen, I know where the pot holders are and how to use her coffee maker.  The New York Times is on the front lawn by the time I take Jack to his train at seven.  I’ve gone back to my old yoga studio for class each morning, taken long walks with old friends, visited the local farmer’s markets (better than ever), and bought Jack a pizza at Joe’s (exactly the same).  

It’s amazing how comfortable we’ve come to feel, how  at home we are here in our old world, even after all this time away. It seemed perfectly natural  for Jack’s pal Will, who grew up in the house behind ours, to saunter through the front door last night and say “hi.”  Within five minutes those two six-foot-tall guys were down on the floor, practicing a wrestling hold, sweaty and laughing, as if they were both eleven again.  

Two days ago, I took a stroll through our old backyard and recalled the planting of every bush and perennial and tree. Remembering all the hours of hard work Steve and I put in over the course of our thirteen years here, trying to create our own version of paradise, I allowed myself a weepy moment at the sight of the weed-choked gardens and untended beds, as overgrown and rampant with vines as  Sleeping Beauty’s entangled castle. But then, all of a sudden, something in me lightened, and I think I let that particular sadness go for good.  It occurred to me that this old, odd house that was our home for so long -- built as a barn in 1850, gutted and turned into a house for humans in 1923 -- has withstood both love and neglect, family life and family deaths, homecomings and goings, for over a century and a half. A hundred years from now, it will stand there still, holding its own silent counsel.  Like all those who came before us, and all those who will come after, we were just a few mortals passing through.  No big deal in the grand scheme of things.

And yet, the seeds we sowed during our own brief time here were not just for the vegetables and flowers that brought us so much passing pleasure, but also seeds of love and friendship that continue to bear fruit in our lives today, despite the passage of time and the challenges of distance. The day we moved away six years ago -- a day that I saw at the time as a wrenching finale to our sons’ childhoods and the life we’d known -- was in fact no such thing.  It was just a day.  Life transforming itself the way it does:  this happens, and then that happens.  In Buddhism it is said that all causes and conditions are related; that the world exists in a state of interdependence.  Because one thing arises, another arises; because of this, that.     

And so it occurs to me now that I was mistaken to ever think of life as a simple series of endings and beginnings.  How self-defeating, to try so hard to grab hold of those things I wanted to keep intact, with the idea that permanence just might be possible. Sitting here by myself, looking at the empty shell of a house that was once stuffed full of us -- but that is now the center of another family’s universe -- I think I finally get it: home really is the place where I am right now, if I choose to make it so. And if I’m awake, and open, and loving what is, then I am always at home, no matter what roof is above my head or what return address I stamp in the upper corner of an envelope.  

Addendum:  Last week, I wrote about a phone call I received seven years ago from my former sister-in-law, asking me to read her dying friend’s manuscript.  Beverly’s husband sent that link on to Jennie -- and after reading my post, she picked up the phone and called me again.  This time, thanks to the imminent publication of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, we connected right away and heart-to-heart, like the dear friends we were thirty years ago.  Jennie works in a book store now, and within minutes we’d hatched a plan -- for me to visit in the fall,  do a reading at the store, have dinner, and spend the night with her family.  It was as if yet another handful of karmic seeds planted in the distant past were suddenly blossoming in this garden of the present moment.  Phone pressed to my ear, listening to Jennie’s familiar voice after all this time, hearing such love and kindness in her words --  that was quite a homecoming, too.  

And publishing a book has not felt like an achievement so much as yet another life challenge to be met.  It’s been quite a lesson in, among other things: how to be vulnerable (some of those Amazon reviewers can be cruel), how to let go (there is something on every page that I’d rewrite if I could), how to overcome fear (I am a nervous public speaker, and author appearances are part of the gig), becoming comfortable with  self-promotion (if I don’t sell my book, no one else will), and getting comfortable, too, with admitting how much I don’t know (just because I’ve written about motherhood and mid-life does not mean I am wise about these things).  

Publishing a book has also been an incredibly rewarding and humbling experience, thanks to the many readers who have taken the time to respond to my story with heartfelt letters, invitations, and profoundly honest  reflections about their own lives. I feel honored to be the recipient of these stories and  grateful for so many new connections and opportunities.  Without question, my life has been enriched, tenfold, by the readers who have written back. 

But pride? Not really, not even for a minute. 

Yesterday afternoon, however, standing in my kitchen and holding a brand new, about-to-be-published, hardcover book in my hands, I just about burst with pride.  Here is a publishing story that strengthens my faith in the power of words, the goodness of people, and even the embattled publishing industry itself.  

Early in 2003, I got a call from my ex-husband’s twin sister.  Her college room mate had been writing short stories for years, she explained, while raising her two children, but had never tried to publish any of her work. Now Beverly was battling pancreatic cancer and her odds did not look good. Jenny thought that some words of encouragement from an editor might cheer her friend, and she was wondering if I’d be willing to take a look at a manuscript. 

I’ve read more manuscripts by friends, and friends of friends, over the years than I can count.  But in all those hours of reading and composing carefully worded letters in response, I don’t think I did myself, or many of those writers, any real favors.  I never “discovered” a great new voice, and I delivered a lot of news that people didn’t want to hear.  Sometimes, that news felt so much like personal rejection that relationships I treasured became frayed, or unraveled altogether.  And so, at some point  when my children were small and it was all I could do to meet my own work deadlines anyway, I decided that the only way to stem the tide and prevent any more friendships from cooling, was to create a simple, across-the-board policy of “no.”  It seemed easier, and kinder, to  say that I had retired from reading unpublished manuscripts altogether, than to spend any more time doing volunteer work that seemed, more often than not, to result in hurt feelings and dashed dreams.  

But this request was different. Even an amicable divorce divides a family. In my own case--married too young and divorced within five years--the split was polite, swift, and complete.  I’d always loved my husband’s sister.  I hadn’t spoken to her in years.  And so, when she broke our long silence to ask a favor, I was happy, relieved even, to oblige.  Here was a way to clear the air between us at long last, to catch up on the news of her life, to do a small kindness and to be of some use.

Jenny chose a couple of her friend’s stories and mailed them to me.  By the time I had read the first one, about two young sisters gathering flowers and a mother dying in childbirth, I was in tears.  I also knew:  Here was a real writer.  I read through the rest of the pages in one sitting, marveling at the language, deeply moved by the lives of these two sisters. And for once, I knew exactly what to say to the author.  “Keep writing.” And, “Your stories should absolutely be published.”  

A few months later, I heard from Jenny again.  Beverly had died, she told me, but the letter I’d written her had brightened her last weeks.  It had also given her the determination to keep working for as long as she possibly could, writing and revising the stories that she would leave behind, the stories that a stranger had read and deemed “publishable.” 

A year or so and several emails and phone calls later, Beverly’s stories returned to me, this time as a complete manuscript, lovingly assembled after her death by her husband Jay and her writing teacher, Jenifer Levin.  Would I read them again, in their entirety?  Might I have some ideas about what to do next? 

The stories held up. More than that, they were full of life and detail.  Completely realized, fleshed out and expanded in the months before Beverly died, they contained a whole vanished world, populated by people as real and quirky as any characters I’d ever met.  I loved them. And yet this time there was no letter to write or author to call, no writer to encourage, just a dedicated husband who, in the wake of his wife’s death, wanted to share her literary gifts with the world and carry forward her dream of one day publishing a book.  

For weeks the manuscript sat on my desk, as I began packing up our suburban house for a move.  Distracted by the dissembling of my own carefully crafted world of home and garden and friends and neighbors, busy disposing of many of our possessions and packing the rest into storage boxes, I felt the weight of this unfinished, unspoken commitment -- a commitment to a woman I’d never met but to whom I now felt intimately connected.  How to help?  I made a call or two, had a copy of Beverly’s manuscript sent to my own agent, and was discouraged to hear exactly what I’d already suspected:  getting a first book of fiction published is hard enough these days.  But without an author to promote it, or the promise of future work and a long career ahead?  Not a chance. 

The week before we moved to New Hampshire, I drove into Boston to participate on a literature panel. A group of authors and editors had been charged that day with judging just over a hundred manuscripts and dispensing grant money to a handful of the most promising writers.  Over lunch, I mentioned to Howard Frank Mosher that I had a manuscript at home that struck me as eminently stronger than any of the work we’d spent the morning underwriting.  His response surprised me.  “I would really love to read that manuscript,” he said. 

And so it was that this extraordinary writer and energetic champion of writers became Beverly’s next great  fan.  Howard not only read the manuscript, he took it upon himself to write an eloquent introduction to it, a critical response that could pave the way with publishers reluctant to take a flier on a novel-in-stories by a deceased, unknown, unpublished writer.  

There are quite a few of us now, midwives to this book that is about to be born at last. Beverly’s family believed all along that her voice would not be silenced by death.  And one by one, those of us who were touched by that singular voice have joined their quiet, determined effort.  An agent friend from my New York publishing days read the manuscript and then wholeheartedly took up the cause.  It took a while, but eventually she found an editor who saw the vision and expanded on it.  And next week, thanks to the efforts of a small group of committed believers, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, by Beverly Jensen will be published by Viking Press.  Beverly will speak at no library luncheons. She will not have the pleasure of hearing from her readers, nor regret an ill-chosen phrase on a page, nor feel the burden of having to earn out her advance or produce a second book.  But I hope that, wherever she is, she is watching, and that she does feel proud.  Proud of her legacy, proud that her work has already inspired such  enthusiasm and  dedication, and proud of her circle of fans and friends, each of whom did his or her own small part to bring her wonderful book into print at last.  It is a group that I am so very proud to be a part of. 

Looking back now, to that summer morning seven years ago, when I took a call from my former sister-in-law and agreed to read a few short stories, I am reminded all over again of my favorite quote, the words by Clarissa Pinkola Estes that I do my best to live by:  “You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion. . . Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.”  Small kindnesses ripple outward, sometimes far, far beyond the limits of our own limited knowledge and understanding.  Sometimes, just be saying “yes,” we do set extraordinary events into motion.  Beverly’s book will arrive in the stores next Thursday, graced with advance praise from the likes of Stephen King, Elizabeth Strout, and Howard Frank Mosher.  But the words I like best come from an advance reader on Amazon, a woman from California who received an uncorrected bound galley and wrote in her online review:  “These characters are not archetypes, they are people.  They don’t represent any idea or theory; they are themselves.  Things happen as they do simply because life is wild and unpredictable.”

So it is.  

But I’ve made several rounds of breakfast, taken a run with Henry, done a huge load of grocery shopping, washed lots of sheets and soggy towels, heard detailed synopses of the latest episodes of “The Office,” bought two quarts of freshly picked strawberries at the farmer’s market, cut peonies and irises from the garden, set the porch table, cooked a welcome-home feast for Jack.  I can't quite believe that it's dinner time already, that I feel this tired, and that I never got any "real" work done today, let alone a downward dog or a long deep breath.  And I feel renewed admiration for every woman who manages a busy household, and still finds time to write and read and think.  For every woman who works outside the home, and manages to take care of the people in the home as well.  For all the women who juggle way more than I do -- raising children and earning a living and tending to those in need -- and who nevertheless also honor their commitments to themselves and their inner lives.  

The soul work we do is so subtle, so easily postponed to another day, so low, sometimes, on the list of priorities.  There is always so much that must be done, that we tend to let go of those things that feel like self-indulgent extras.  It seems impossible, at times, to find room in our busy, demanding lives to allow for silence and solitude and regeneration.  Today, there’s been more hustle and bustle and conversation going on in these rooms than we’ve seen in months.  There are piles everywhere.  Plans being made, tennis rackets and shoes proliferating, dirty glasses filling the sink.  I’m sort of amazed at how much sheer space they take up, these grown boys of mine.   

And yet, tonight feels like a party. My three favorite people in the world are right here:  husband, two sons.  At least I have the presence of mind to pay attention, to be grateful, to remember that this really is IT:  the life I have, the best life there is, the present moment.  

Arriving on campus in the fall of 1976, a slightly pudgy, shy, utterly intimidated freshman from small-town New Hampshire, I had not a clue as to what to wear, let alone what I was meant to do or who I wanted to be. I had never seen a Lanz nightgown, read the New York Times, or heard of Virginia Woolf or Dana Hall.  I didn’t own a pair of sneakers, had never listened to jazz, or heard poetry read aloud. I had never eaten with chopsticks or had a pizza delivered to the door.   There was a lot to learn.  The very first night, over dinner in Martha Wilson house, someone declared that we should all go around the table and say whether we were virgins or not; I remember being enormously grateful that I had at least relieved myself of that burden over the course of the summer.  “I slept with an actor,” I said, feigning nonchalance.  My Smith education had begun.

Saturday night, there were quite a few of us members of the class of 1980 hanging around in the living room of Northrup House, doing what women have done at their college reunions for decades--paging through exhumed yearbooks, drinking wine out of plastic cups, dancing (to “Brick House,” of course, party anthem of my era) chatting with old friends, finding ourselves deep in conversation with strangers who should have been our friends thirty years ago, but who we somehow missed during our four years on campus.   

The black and white yearbook pages were a jolt, a layer of the distant past suddenly superimposed upon the present.  Clearly, quite a few of us had resolved our seventies fashion dilemmas easily, if not elegantly, as revealed by the photographic record:  we were either Annie Hall or Dorothy Hamill; we favored long straight hair, mens’ shirts and vests, and baggy pants, or, alternatively, wedge haircuts, turtlenecks, and Fair Isle sweaters.  

But answers to the real questions--of identity and ambition and experience--could not be found in the yellowing pages of the Madeleine, any more than they could be revealed as I walked around the idyllic campus, stealing looks at name tags, trying to match fifty-one year old faces with thirty-year old memories.   Who are these women now?  I kept wondering, wanting to know every single life story.  What are my classmates feeling and thinking, as they walk these paths, poke their heads into our former classrooms, brush their teeth at the communal sinks, and turn down the narrow single beds in our old dorm rooms, with their high ceilings and well-worn wooden floors? 

“I feel as if I’m finally becoming the person that I used to imagine myself being when I was here,” my friend Wendy said the first afternoon, as we wandered down the hill toward town. I knew what she meant.  Surely every one of us  must have had visions of ourselves back then, of who we aspired to be and what we wanted to do with our lives.  Role models abounded. In my years at Smith, a parade of remarkable women--poets and politicians, businesswomen and activists, professionals and philanthropists--visited campus to tell us their stories and to inspire us to think big as we wrote our own.  Maya Angelou, Jane Pauley, and Chris Williamson all came, spoke, and made lasting impressions;  we walked in the long shadows of our most admired alumnae: Julia Child, Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, Madeleine L’Engle, Gloria Steinem.   Anything seemed possible.  “Anything is,” each of these women assured us, whether in person or by example.  

Now we were back, a hundred and fifty of us or so, exactly the same age this year that Jill Ker Conway was when she “retired” from  the Smith presidency in order to go make the world a better place for underprivileged women.  “I was always aware,” she said in an address to our class on Saturday afternoon, “that while I was busy raising money for this entitled institution, there were women who could not afford to feed their children, who had no access to health care, who were abused by the their employers.  The longer I stayed, the bigger my debt to those women became.  And so, at fifty, I knew it was time for me to figure out how I could make a difference for them.”  

Jill--we always called her Jill--is seventy-six now, and she is still working full time to make the world a better place for women.  She stood before us without so much as a note, smiling warmly, as trim and articulate and lovely as ever, and told us of her work on the Nike board, her years of travel throughout the third world, reforming factories, bringing nutrition and fair wages and improved working conditions to underprivileged women from Cambodia to China.  Currently, she is writing a book about aging, working on various environmental initiatives, and still active on the corporate boards of Nike and Colgate Palmolive, aware that changing corporate culture from the inside is a powerful way to make everyday life better for women everywhere.  At the end of her talk, the standing ovation was immediate and heartfelt, as it always was and is for our cherished mentor.  

Next on the agenda was a book group discussion about The Gift of an Ordinary Day.  I left the Campus Center wondering if anyone would come. After all, we had already been so well inspired and filled up.  And there was nothing I could offer that could even begin to compare to the experience we had just had.   It had been a long day, and now it was the end of a beautiful afternoon, far too nice to be inside.

But my classmates showed up, almost all of them it seemed, and crowded into the room.  I was not about to pull out my little stack of carefully written file cards, after  Jill’s flawlessly spontaneous performance.  And so I took a deep breath and just began to talk -- about how it feels to be halfway through life, and still figuring things out. How hard it is sometimes, given the culture that we live in, to remember that real happiness doesn’t have much to do with how impressive we appear to everyone else, or how much money we make or how much stuff we have, or even how much we’ve accomplished during our years on the planet.  That the one thing we do learn,  as we bump up against the inevitable losses and challenges and changes of mid-life, is that what really matters is how we feel inside about the person we’ve turned out to be, and how strong our relationships are with the people we care about.  How much we love and are loved in return.  After years of looking ahead, into some unknown future, I admitted that what seems to matter most now is the fleeting, precious present moment, and learning how to live it fully.  Embracing what is, rather than wishing for something different. 

Someone asked if I would read from the last chapter of the book. And so I turned to the passage about my neighbor Debbie, and how she has taught me through her own example that my real work, day in and day out, is simply to be kind, to be present, to mend the part of the world that is within my reach.  Tears were flowing by then; the room was full of emotion.  It was time for everyone else to talk.  

“I'm not ever going to be Jill Ker Conway,” one woman said.  “But I guess it’s time to let that go anyway.”  And we laughed, nodding our heads, each one of us thinking the same thing: "I'm not, either."    We are not all meant for boardrooms, and yet our lives do not matter any less for that. We need not do great things, to paraphrase Mother Teresa, but simply small things, with great love. Sometimes the path leads us to quiet searching, to helping a friend in need, preparing a meal, or celebrating a sunrise.  Sometimes our job is simply to make our own peace with the way things are -- an illness, a divorce, a loss.  

What a relief it was at last, to exhale. To allow ourselves to be seen, and to begin, one after another, to share our real stories with one another.  Stories not of achievements and bottom lines, but of mid-life reckonings and second journeys, of doubts and struggles and disappointments, lessons learned the hard way, changes in direction and hard-won self-acceptance. Of our ongoing quests to become more fully ourselves as we seek--even now, thirty years  after throwing our caps in the air--to discover the lives we are meant to lead.

“I’m fifty-one years old,” one woman said, “and I’m still not sure who I am.”  There was so much pain in her voice, that I’ve been haunted by her words ever since.  And yet this morning, it occurred to me: perhaps not knowing is actually a good thing.  Maybe this is really what it’s all about--continuing to seek, continuing to ask the hard questions, as we confront the challenging, ongoing work of bringing our lives into alignment with our deepest values.  Finding within ourselves the fidelity to be true to ourselves, even as we grow and change and let go of youthful ambitions and dreams that didn’t turn out, in the end, to fit the people we really are after all. 

This is what happens when women come together and speak their truths.  We learn from one another and support one another. We are reminded that we aren’t alone, and that no one, not even Jill Ker Conway, has all the answers.  But that we can always, always, reach out a hand and mend the part of the world that is within our reach. For, as Anne Morrow Lindberg, another famous Smith alum once wrote, "To give, without any reward, or notice, has a special quality of its own."

(With thanks to Marianne Campolongo for the photos!)

I first read those words about nine months ago, sitting alone in an empty kitchen, having wondered for weeks just what I was meant to do next, now that the house was built, the long-awaited book finally written and published, the sons nearly grown.

This weekend, I went to meet the woman who wrote them, the woman who once ran away from home to spend a year in a cottage by the sea, in order to find her way back to her own true self, a self long since lost to the demands of marriage, motherhood, career, and the needs of others.  

Packing the car on Friday afternoon, I still wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for on my own “Second Journey” retreat, or why I was going off to spend a weekend with a group of strangers on Cape Cod, when I had more than enough to do right here -- weeds to pull and a garden to plant, a manuscript to read for a friend, a husband who’d have preferred to have me around, a to-do list filling the whole right page of my calendar.  

And yet.  The ache I’ve felt deep in my breast this year has not been assuaged by any of the small, worthy tasks that fill my days.  I do all I can, in all directions, and then lie awake at night, worrying about things beyond my control. I meditate in the morning, practice living in the moment, and yet carry a deep sadness for moments already gone. I love the people in my life, and yet feel battered again and again by unsettling, difficult conversations.  I reach out to my teenaged son, and feel not connection but more distance, our relationship raw and tender to the touch, like second-degree burns on my heart.  I answer my e-mails, read a little, write a little, spend time with my family, bring lunch to a friend. The days are busy and full and good. Still, the question nibbles at my edges: What now?

Saturday afternoon, standing barefoot on the beach, I glimpsed the beginnings of an answer.  Part of the ache, I know, comes from my own sense of still not being quite up to the job of being me.  Not a good enough mother, wife, or friend, no matter how much I care.  Not a good enough writer, or yoga student, or meditator, no matter how hard I try.  Not a good enough public speaker, or checkbook balancer, or wage earner, no matter how much effort I put in.  

I know that where I see only lack and failure, others see competence. But I keep my own secret list of insecurities and shortcomings, certain that what seems to come so easily and naturally to others must be hard-won by me.  I want to be better at living my life than I am these days, to feel sufficient just as I am, more certain of what I’m meant to do now, and how I’m meant to be.  

We had arrived on the outer banks by boat, rolling our pant legs up high and hopping into the clear, cold water one by one to wade ashore.  With a knowing twinkle in her eye, Joan had given us each our marching orders back at the dock, along with our bag lunches: solitude and silence.  Out here, both were easy to find.  A few steps along the beach, and I was already alone, heading out toward the breaks, the surf, the wide open stretches of dune and shore grass and wild water.  The sun was warm, the wind so fierce it whipped stinging needles of sand onto every morsel of exposed flesh.  

For four hours or so, I wandered in silence, shedding layers of extra clothing along with layers of identity, feeling, thoughts, and inner chatter.  There was nothing to do but walk and look and wonder, no where to go except where my feet carried me.  No sooner had I taken a step, than the next wave rolled in, erasing my foot prints from the sand. The scouring, relentless wind washed my mind empty of thought and judgment and doubt.  Step by step, moment by moment, I relaxed.  First into a kind of inner stillness.  Then, into peace.  And from there, it was not much of a leap to joy. 

How satisfying it is, to disappear, and then to be found by the world. How exhilarating, to be relieved of all expectation and commitment, and then to rediscover your own bare-naked self.  What a relief, to lighten my psychic load, to let go of all the worries and judgments and doubts I lug around day after day.  What a blessing, to see what it is that remains, after everything heavy and useless and outgrown has been dropped and left along the way.  What joy, to be slowly but surely filled right up to the brim again with love.  

Far from the mainland of my daily life, it dawned on me: love allows me to get out of myself, and to be grateful for all things.  Love enables me to embrace my life exactly as it is, rather than regretting that it’s not precisely as I want it to be.  Love heals that which is split within; it restores my strength and faith, reminds me that who I am really is all right with me. 

Joan Anderson calls the beach walk a scavenger hunt for the soul.  And so it is.  Sometime late in the afternoon, as I trudged against the wind, back toward the lighthouse and civilization, I picked up a wide, white, bowl of a clam shell, rubbed smooth by wind and water.  A vessel it was, but not one that could ever hold very much.  Water would flow in and out with ease, passing through this gentle curve of a cup,  as shallow as my own open hand.  This, I realized, is what I aspire to -- to unfurl my fist, to allow love to pour in and to spill right out again with ease, without all the grasping and the holding that so often entangles me. How I yearn to be as pure and clean and simple as that bleached white shell:  receiving and releasing, filling and emptying and filling again, eternally open to the flow of life.  

I adore Joan Anderson’s books of self-discovery and renewal, love her willingness to laugh at herself even through tears of confusion and despair, her generosity of spirit, her eagerness to share what she’s learned with the rest of us restless, middle-aged seekers. And I am so grateful now that when I first wrote to her, months ago, she answered my letter.  And that when she said, “Come to the beach,” I said I would.  There is not a woman among us who couldn’t use a weekend away, a walk on the shore, a good night’s sleep alone in a bed far from home.  I know I am lucky to have had all those things this weekend, along with the most precious gift of all -- time to just be, without one bit of pressure to do.  

In the end, I did find what I was looking for, out there on the outer banks:  Hope.  Hope that things will work out for the best. Hope that when the going gets tough, as it always does,  I will remember who am and draw strength from the truth that I already know: love enlarges and sustains us.  Love saves us from ourselves.  Love is pure, positive energy. Love really is all we need.

Joan gave us much this weekend, from a candle-lit lobster dinner in her home, to belly laughs and yoga on the beach.  But I think the words that I treasure most now that I’m home again were not hers, but ones she shared by Robert Frost.  Asked if he had hope for the future, Frost replied:

“Yes.  And even for the past, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was.  Something that I can accept--mistakes made by the self I had to be, or was not able to be.”  

I drove away from the Cape last night refreshed and inspired, and bearing this same small hope in the palm of my own hand.  It is time to forgive myself for not being more. Time to love myself, imperfections and all, just as I am.