My daughter is an organizational wizard.
She sprints through her days knitting together a life of professional power and loving motherhood while being an enthusiastic fun maker, community volunteer and dutiful child. I look at her in wonder when friends I have known lean in and whisper, “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
I do have vague memories of being on top of things, but that was long ago. Time, gravity and a lot of carbs have modified being on top of things to not being able to find the top of things or even be able to identify what things I am looking for.
If I let my mind wander, as I did this morning, little things, some so special that it’s difficult to speak of them without tearing up, captured a mother when she was in charge of her life, sort of … since mothers are never completely in charge of their lives.
I recently came across some boxes of herbal tea. These little tins, found while cleaning out some of the stuff that accumulates over 40 years, still contained several tea packets. The tins took me back to the mid-1980s when I thought I was so au courant as I placed herbal tea sachets in a glass pitcher filled with Skaneateles Lake water to make “sun tea.”
Truthfully, I had only just heard of sun tea. As a teen, the oldest of four, it was my responsibility to prepare dinner each day and, for the beverage at those long-ago dinners, I made iced tea with hot water.
So, when I heard about sun tea, I elected to demonstrate to my growing children that their mother was as “with it” as other mothers. I had given up on competing with those other mothers who complained so sadly about not finding anything in a size 1 to fit them. I was a size 1 when I was 6. So, in my mind, the sun tea was a kind of way to level the playing field. That tea sat on the railing of the deck at our cottage, soaking up the heat of the sun while I went about my days organizing our summer lakeside lives.
There is an eight year difference between my offspring. Ben, the older child, found that his Boston whaler could take him down the lake to visit with classmates while his little sister spent her time with the “with-it sun tea” mom. And our summer pas de deux were fun. At least that is the way I remember it. There was the doll house, the tiny doll furniture, card games, paper dolls, stories to be read out loud, lemon juice in her hair to bring out sunlights … and premonitions of her as a future hostess as she planned a dinner party at the cottage. We’d scour the magazines that had piled up over the years for recipes and make lists of what we needed to carry out our plans which often required trips to Wegmans for ingredients and special accoutrements.
Lying close to the two tin boxes of herbal tea was an invitation to Dining Delight, a double fold card complete with menu and instructions about where to sit, printed by a 10-year-old hand. At this particular party we had elected to serve a Wegmans version of lasagna accompanied by a homemade salad and a dessert that was the inspiration for the party.
That dessert was a luscious lemon mousse mounded in goblets what we bought at one of our forays to Wegmans. That little girl’s pride in all that she did to make the party happen was such a gift. Our guests were Dad and her brother Ben. The table was set with our best floral themed paper plates and specially-folded napkins and lit with the glow of candles which were absolutely necessary to the party’s success.
That was a lifetime ago. Now my daughter uses those goblets for wine or desserts as she now manages her days at the cottage with her two teenage sons. Today there are things like Nintendo Switch and Fire TV to entertain young males. But she is, as ever, organizing, attending to the needs of the cottage, its garden and its occupants. Our son, the guest at this special dinner, is getting his whaler ready for his two almost three-year-old boys for when the time comes … the circle continues.
There were real, touchable things about those days at the lake; the “dinner” parties and the invitation are perfect examples. We lived them, the moments falling into place one after the other and disappearing into wherever experience goes, leaving only the traces in memorabilia and memories.
I sit here typing amidst a mess of things to do, with no sun tea brewing or the anticipation of a lovely party, still smiling at the memories, precious beyond the life of mom the bill payer and general factotum and organizer of summer days who no longer seeks to be “with it.”
