A Season Not Lost

Soccer season, like so many other things over the past seven months, did not go quite as planned this year. On the day that would have, in a non-pandemic world, held the annual Halloween Cup, we woke up to four inches of heavy wet snow, with more falling fast. I guess the silver lining is that we didn’t need to worry about cancelling due to bad weather and slick roads, since Covid had already canceled the event for us.

In the grand scheme of things, whether kids get to play soccer or not may seem trivial. But any semblance of normal these days is a big deal for them – for all of us, really.

For most of the summer, we weren’t sure if the kids – high school, middle school, kindergarten – would get a soccer season at all. While my older children have had something like a regular season in middle school, my 6^th grader’s team (which I coached with a friend) was restricted to practices and intra-squad scrimmages. No games against other towns. No joyfully-past-their-bedtime Under the Lights tourney in Littleton. No Haverhill Cup.

But for a few hours each week the kids were on the field, together, kicking the ball around and learning the game a little bit better. Two days a week, they made their way through stretching and wind sprints, skills work and tactical talks, all without the potential reward of earning a W or raising a trophy. They listened and worked hard. And out there on our home field, we all smiled. A lot.

In this year of so much weirdness, I think soccer was a happy highlight for the kids. I know it was for me.

One player showed up to the first few practices in a cast-like boot to protect a still-healing broken foot. He did as much as he could, so hampered, then jumped in full steam as soon as the doc cleared him to lose the boot. Another kid arrived one day complaining, in a charmingly happy manner, that he hadn’t had time after school to change out of his restrictive “school picture day shorts.” A few of them boogied mid-scrimmage one afternoon to music playing from a nearby field. Once, a quick, furious downpour left the kids soaked – and scrimmaging under a brilliant double rainbow.

At different times throughout the season, my daughter and I lamented some of the differences of this year compared to other soccer seasons. She missed the challenge of competitions, the power of playing good defense, the thrill of scoring goals. I missed thinking about which lineup would work best on any given day and watching the kids figure out this “beautiful game” little by little.

Last October, her team made it to the Halloween Cup final only to watch the opposing team’s players lift the candy-filled cup at the end of the day. It was my third time in five Halloween Cups coaching a runners-up team. Maybe next year, I told my daughter then. This year’s tournament would have been her final Halloween Cup, and mine, too.

Alas, this October there would be no penalty kick shootouts and dedicated fans, no games played just after dawn and just before dark, no triumphant wins and disappointing losses. This October, there was no gathering of teams from throughout the region, no gaggles of kids running around the Dow and swinging through the playground between games, no concession stand stocked with baked goods and crockpots of warm food, endless pots of coffee and countless volunteers.

Instead, our season finale was just 15 kids and two coaches who love soccer, on the field together. We ended the season with a long scrimmage session. The kids passed the ball and made some moves and scored a few goals. They took some hard knocks and helped each other up. There was less intensity than the normal end-of-the-season competition, but more laughter.

Probably, if someone asked, I’d say I wish it had been a normal soccer season. I wish these kids who are moving on to middle school next year had their chance to be the big kids on the small field. I wish I’d gotten to coach them through one more tournament. But in a year that has often involved seeking out silver linings, we still managed to find plenty of them on the soccer field. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's October 29, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.    

Dance of the Seasons

A mid-October snow storm laid a thick layer of white across the Presidentials and left Lafayette rimmed in frost while I was away last weekend. What little snow fell in the yard was gone by the time I returned home Sunday afternoon, receding in sunshine barely warm enough to nudge the temps above freezing.

Sunday’s snowy painting of the peaks was the third time this fall they’ve turned white. It’s likely the snow there will fade again, at least for a while, before it settles in for the long months of winter. This is the dance between the seasons: Winter takes one step forward, then two steps back as Fall makes another pirouette. I find myself caught up in the dance, back in that familiar place between eager anticipation of Winter and a wistfulness for fading Fall.

I drove north Sunday along the back roads of Vermont and New Hampshire through a golden shower of wind-born birch and sugar maple leaves, which rose up from the road as I passed and swirled around the truck before falling again, tumbling along the pavement in the wake of my passage, then settling to await the next car and take flight once more.

Most of the leaves have fallen now, although there’s one big sugar maple between my desk and the mountains still clinging to its yellow foliage, and the oaks and beech trees will hold their russet leaves a little longer. Once the leaves have gone completely and left the trees irregular skeletons of trunk, branches, tapering twigs, I am ready for snow. There seems little point to me in cold, leafless days without snow, and am anxious for Fall to give in, finally and completely, to Winter.

Still, there are things left to do as the seasons twirl around each other. We accomplish the work of shifting seasons in fits and starts – clearing the garden of its withered remains, stacking firewood, pulling hats and mittens and warmer coats from the closet only when we finally need them – moving more frantically when the weather turns toward Winter, and unhurriedly on those still-warm, brighter days.

Last week, between the fall’s second whitening of the peaks and the weekend’s snow, I made a pre-winter outing to the top of Mount Lafayette. The last time I made that hike, I think, was during high school, and I’d been wanting to get back to the summit for several years. Thursday was too good a day, too late in the season, to pass it up.

The summit showed white as I drove toward the trailhead, and the temperature hovered right around freezing as I set out, but the upward trek soon warmed me. As I climbed above treeline, a stiff wind with mingled with the October sunshine, the chill of one cutting into the warmth of the other. The white I’d seen from below turned out to be only rime ice, clinging in stubborn, frosty feathers to the high alpine vegetation and boulders, but already melting from the sunny side.

From the summit, bundled up in winter gear, I could see pockets of fall color lingering in the valley. By the time I returned to the relative warmth of the valley floor and looked back toward the summit, the white had receded from the peaks of the Franconia Range. One step forward, two steps back. At least until Winter finds its beat and dances on past Fall.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the October 23, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Cleaving to Sunshine

Amid the blaring colors of autumn, summer has returned fleetingly to northern New England this week. Last week we dug out the wool socks and fleece pullovers, uncovered the mittens and ski hats, and huddled by the fireplace as frost painted the lawn and fields in an overnight cover of cold white. But then heat returned, and with it flip-flops and tee-shirts and skin bared to the light.

We call this Indian Summer, and I’ve never been sure why. Who has time to wonder, as the dark of evening creeps closer to midday? We push ourselves outside, faces turned toward the sun, knowing all too well what comes next.

Don’t get me wrong, I love winter. Always have. Anyone who has chosen to make her home in northern New England is wise to embrace winter and its stark, white beauty. We can ski here – if we’re lucky – during at least six months of the year. But loving winter does nothing, for me anyway, to lessen the joys of these warm, bright days in October.

This is the season of country fairs, when we celebrate the beauty of fall and the bounty of the summer just gone by. We postpone putting in the storm doors, hoping for a few more days of the house flung open to outside warmth. We dodge the steady stream of leaf-peepers choking the roads and trails and return to more secret places for the season. We cover the tomatoes when frost threatens, hoping for one more harvest, and we put up a bit of the summer produce to enjoy in the darkness of winter. We stack firewood, rake leaves, cut back the flower gardens.

Even as we cleave to the sunshine, we know the icy winds and long nights of winter are coming.

As a final act of faith that summer will return to some distant time, we dig into the still-warm earth and plant bulbs, thinking beyond the depths of winter snow to the first blooms of spring, when color will return in the gentle purple of crocuses, the happy yellow of daffodils, the warm red of tulips.