Where does time go? I’m hanging around here at the barren, mostly empty beach remembering when I used to get up in the morning, put my bathing suit on no matter what the weather, and run wild with all the other beach urchins all day long. Swimming and building forts and damming up the streams. Rowing out into the bay in leaky old boats singing at the tops of our lungs. It all seems like paradise but of course there were times when I was fighting with my brother or my cousins or the older kids got tired of us hanging around them or I was in trouble with my parents.

And then somebody somewhere hit the goddamn fast forward button. The G1 folk all took off and I had my own little beach urchins and I would sit down there and watch them swim all day. I could still snuggle with them and read to them and sing to them before they went to sleep. The Commander taught 3-year-olds how to cut vegetables with a sharp knife and we instituted the three o’clock snack to try to ensure that we had at least a couple hours in the day when we weren’t processing dishes. And again it all seems like paradise until I remember the times when somebody or other (often me) was cranky and not with the program or there were so many people and aminals in the cabin that it was impossible for everyone (often me) to get the amount of space they needed.

And then somebody somewhere hit the goddamn fast forward button *again*. The G2 folk are starting to disappear on us and G3 too, kee-reist, and the youngest of the G4 folk is 17. My little lizard is heading off to California in August and I am happy for her. But we are once again in that kind of between-generation limbo where there are no little kids running around. And actually, not a whole lot of people in general. I can pretty much do whatever I want up here. I’ve been looking forward to this for years but now I have to admit, sometimes I feel a little lonely. I’ll get used to it, I guess.

In a little bit, I am going to pull the boats up onto the bank and try to wrench Froggy grokGOKRGROK away from his friend Green Guy and we are going to head back south and ascend once again to the Planet Ann Arbor. It’s early in the summer and we’ll be back and I have about a million coffee and lunch dates between now and then and plenty of other less-fun stuff to do, so the time will go fast.

I hope when I am a feisty old octowoman I will still be bombing around kayaking and skiing and hiking and writing in my stoopid blahg. But I’m not ready for that yet, so please can we just lay off that goddamn fast forward button for a while?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.