Imagining for a moment that I had more time—a clear hour between the tasks that fritter holes in the hours between pickup and drop-off, an actual temporal escape hatch from the endless scroll of attention-fragmenting to-dos—I'd like to sit on a park bench and do nothing. I think one of the saddest scenes in any book I have ever read is the end of the The House At Pooh Corner, when Christopher Robin takes Winnie-the-Pooh for a walk and explains that because he is going to school, he won't have time to do nothing anymore, and nothing is his favorite thing to do. That passage has been one of the touchstones of parenthood for me, to keep our lives as underscheduled as possible so that my kid gets plenty of nothing. (I get all of my best parenting insights from children's books; Moominmamma's endless well of calm love, hands-off support, and helpful handbag items are things I think about all the time). Still, the somethings encroach, and I need plenty of nothing myself to function.
So, to the park bench. No headphones, just the happenstance combination of breeze and leaves and insect-whir and the distant dull grumble of people moving from one place to the next in cars and planes leaving vaporous trails. No phone, just sunlight and shadow. Nothing to do and nowhere to be.
I might close my eyes and think of the things I need to do; I might wonder what we'll eat for dinner and if I need to run by the store later. Or I might remember lakes. This was a summer where I swam in five—Ontario, silty-bottomed and still; Huron, clear as green glass and boneshakingly cold, edged with stones white as bones full of the skeletons of tiny, long-dead creatures; Superior, brown and clear and also cold. Its rainbowed rocks were pieces of whorled time, embodied and solid, that you could pick up and marvel over, eruptions and foldings frozen forever in bands of color. Michigan, the lake most like the ocean, edged with golden dunes that seem to stretch forever, and Erie, the lake I know best, with water like labradorite—translucent grey and brown and blue by turns.
And then my time would be up, and I would need to get back to all the other things.
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Janessa Leone bucket hat / Arq Cameo crop top / Ralph Lauren paint-spatted pants (an affordable alternative to Bode's pair for this season and Comme des Garcon's from 2011) / Shaina Mote work shirt in East / Arcopedico shoes / Mondo Mondo cosmopolitan hoops / Victorian silver love-token necklace from A. Brandt & Son / 1980s mechanical Timex / Zilla gold foil lunch bag / The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield.
