Not All Who Wander Are Lost

This morning a gleeful trip to the Brattleboro Retreat Petting Farm, once a theraputic treatment for the mentally ill, now a mecca of last-ditch summer entertainment for children and the childlike. Willow crowed at the roosters and fed goats grain pellets from her bare hands. The emus glowered at us, and the llama's didn't spit; we all held baby chicks, and a tiny baby piglet climbed through the bars of her family cage to get a full-out scratch from me, which made my day -- doesn't everyone secretly wish they could have a wee pink pig for a housepet?

Skinny dipping this afternoon again, Brattleboro yesterday (and a nice yummy dinner at Max's for our anniversary while the in-laws watched the kid get filthy in the garden). Sitting on the porch rocker just a few minutes ago after the kid went up to bed with her mother, I watched the hills beyond the hills glow gold with a sunset rain-and-fog, and listened to the Canada geese call to each other as they bed down in the horsefields. But the buzz in the back of the brain has started, and a chatter of email messages unsent, plans and sequences for the days ahead flits through my brain familiarly, distracting me from the universe, as it always does. It's the end of the summer, and only this morning seems clear in retrospect. Too soon it will be a distant memory.

I'm off to the "office" tomorrow to prep the tech for this weekend's reunion planning committee events -- set up data projectors and lapel mics where needed, and, while class chairs learn to sell the school to their fellow alums, stand by at $18 an hour during their use in case a battery blows. I'll be in the apartment solo all weekend, while Darcie and Willow entertain here at the housesitting gig until Monday late.

For me, starting Monday, it's meetings meetings meetings, three days straight. Followed by meetings, and quite probably some meetings until Friday.

And then the kids arrive, and once again, we live where we work.

This year I won't be teaching any major courses, for the first time since I started working the prep school gig in 1998. This year, too, there's a little person running around at home, once who finally kisses me and hugs me goodnight, instead of the old pre-verbal to miss all day. And this is the year we'll be shopping the prep school market, along most of my teaching peers, I gather -- the school goes down to halfsize at the school year's end, and given the tight time frame for placement in the prep school world (basically, a three week period in March), it's far too late to start the process when the pink slips start coming down the pike.

No wonder my back aches.

It was another wonderful summer. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

But there's nothing wrong with wishing it could have lasted forever.