Summer Time

It’s cold and sitting here in the pre-dawn chill; it seems more like autumn than summer. His Holiness crept out of his room a little while ago shivering and crawled into bed with Mama. Much earlier, too early for my own good, I had taken up my place in the tiny living room of our cabin, pecking away at my notes for a meeting I would be having later today to plan a new playground here in Smallwood.
It’s been a cool, rainy summer in the southern Catskills but it has been a great one. In a little over 72 hours we will be making our way back to Cologne where I will once again take up my struggle with the German language and HH will enter the first grade. Where did the time go? It seems like yesterday that we arrived in America and how is it possible that HH is already starting school? Wasn’t I just bundling him into his Baby Bjorn and walking him down to the Union Square Farmer’s Market to sniff the fresh herbs and flowers?
I was sitting by the water with a friend yesterday, a man who has two children about HH’s age, and we were talking about our perception of time, of how it speeds up as we age. As we watched our children digging in the sand, I tried to will the moment to linger. I had charged the battery in the digital camera that morning and had taken shot after shot of the children, realizing the photo ops were dwindling and wanting to save as much of the experience of summer as possible before we returned home. From experience I know these pictures will be viewed over and over again in the coming months, as winter settles in and the dull gray canopy that passes for sky reasserts itself over our lives.
One morning soon, HH will wander into our kitchen in Cologne, sit on my lap and the two of us will look at pictures from this summer. And far sooner than I care to acknowledge, sooner than I can even imagine, I will be sitting in a kitchen somewhere alone, paging through the images of summers passed, times I could not stop or even slow