I remember the first summer that we lived in this house. It was a little after 9PM on a mid-summer evening. TJ was upstairs, and I was cleaning up downstairs when I looked out the window and saw fireworks in the distance. I called him down, and we both went outside on top of the hill in our backyard and watched the fireworks while we swatted away gnats, mosquitoes, and fireflies. Every year since then (this is our seventh summer here,) we have caught the tail end of those fireworks from a distance.
But this year we decided we wanted a closer look.
We drove out to the end of one of the main streets in the town next to us, right to where the street meets the cornfield, and we parked our car. We joined with about fifty other people and took our lawn chairs out of the trunk and sat behind our car, looking up at the sky over blocks and blocks of corn with only blocks and blocks of corn surrounding us.
We hadn’t expected to come and we surely hadn’t expected the weather to be in the mid-fifties, so we were all huddled together, wrapped in sweaters and beach blankets that we had found behind the seats in the car. Magoo chattered excitedly, telling us what every firework reminded her of, squealing in delight at the best. Goosie sat cuddled on my lap with my sweater wrapped tightly all around her, her lips turning purple but her squeals getting louder and louder as the show progressed. And then there was little Miss Mae, asleep and warm inside the car for the first half, but eager to join us all in the cold for the second half.
As I sat there, giddy with delight as I watched my girls watching the show, I thought back to pictures of my own childhood.
In my mind, I saw a picture of my sisters, my brother, and myself in our backyard during the summer. There was a kiddie pool in the middle, and our old dog lounging to the side next to our picnic table.
I saw a picture of us in front of our old camper, eating breakfast and another of us sharing time over the campfire.
I saw birthday parties and Christmases, first days of school and lost teeth.
All stored away in photo albums and locked away in memories.
Some of these times I remember and some I just recall through pictures.
But I see them as a season. A bright and happy and unique season where we were the little ones and the world was bright and open and safe and warm.
Then my mind jumped to the future, ten or fifteen years from now. I saw TJ and I sitting in the same spot with our lawn chairs and cameras, but this time we are sitting alone, the girls having gone off to spend the weekend night with friends and boyfriends. I saw us content with where we were but reminiscing wistfully back to a time when the girls couldn’t stand to be more than five feet from us. A time when they cuddled on laps and screamed in delight. A time when their worlds were so very small that we were the center of them. A time that would grow sweeter and sweeter in our memories as the years rolled slowly on by.
And I realized just like the seasons of my youth, these seasons will pass. Time will move on, and we will be left with memories.
This time with little ones underfoot is just like the fireworks — we see the beauty, we sometimes giggle at the magnificence just like we do the pictures in the sky, but the thundering sound echoing against the horizon lags just a little bit behind just as the significance of this season perhaps comes just a little bit later, after the colors have faded, when we wait in the silence of the time in between.
All we have are seasons. As we go through, it seems as if life is a series of todays, but what that fails to take into account is that as our days become yesterdays, seasons fade into the darkness and we move into new ones.
Cherish the seasons. Some are tough. Some are long. Some are perhaps darker than we wish they would be. But they all make up the tapestry of our lives. They make us who we are. They are the memories that become our histories. They combine to create our one, unique, individual story.
And for that, each one is so very precious.
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