Impromptu Play

It is fully dark these days by 8:15. I know, because when I looked outside the other night to see what the kids were doing in the yard, I could find them only by their voices. And because a few minutes later, the youngest came in for a headlamp – a tool used normally for camping (or spelunking), but in this case needed to prolong the game of 2 v. 2 wiffleball that had started before dinner, taken a second intermission for dessert, and was now continuing, literally, into the dark of night.

I loved it. The whole unscripted, kid-decided rules, is-anyone-even-keeping-score fun of it. My kids have played a fair bit of wiffleball this summer, along with other spontaneous, sometimes made-up games.

When their California cousins were here near the start of summer, the kids spent hours running around my parents’ yard with one type of ball or another. They made up varying teams, mixing and matching the three California teens and the three New Hampshire pre-teens for whatever the game du jour was. Often this was kickball. Sometimes the grownups weren’t sure what was happening, but it was fun to watch.

When the Texas cousins arrived soon after the California contingent had departed, a whole new gaggle of kids took to playing made up games or some variation of soccer – played barefoot and usually with the littlest kids tending the goal – or hide-and-seek or capture the flag. They must have run miles all those evenings, across my in-laws’ wide lawn, oblivious to the glorious mountain views beyond them, just focused on the game.

When they play on their own, kids get to make up the rules – and they have to referee themselves. Generally, they figure it out relatively peacefully. But my kids – and others – can be uber competitive: sometimes there are squabbles. Sometimes someone stomps away in frustration, but that someone always ends up back in the mix eventually. Nobody wants to miss out on the fun for long.

A couple of weeks ago, when the out-of-town cousins were all long gone, I was finishing up the dinner dishes when I saw my older daughter run out of the garage with a pair of clippers and a metal rake. Sitting on the front porch with my husband a few minutes later, I watched the kids far up in the front field, moving around by one of the large maple trees there.

Eventually, the two girls careened partway down the driveway on bikes, dismounted to grab a couple of large-ish birch branches fallen nearby, and lugged them all the way back up to the maple tree. As we watched the kids move around near the tree, into and out of the woods nearby, we wondered what on earth they were doing.

We agreed, though, that it didn’t really matter. They were outside. They were working together instead of arguing (which, believe it or not, happens a fair amount). They were using their brains and their bodies. We let them be until the gathering darkness made it hard to see them, then called them in for bedtime.

They were building a fort, they said, and they continued the mission the following day before moving on to the next spontaneous, unstructured summer thing.

This week’s impromptu, hours-long, into-the-dark wiffleball game came after three of the four kids playing had spent a full morning at middle school orientation and two more hours at soccer practice. It came in the waning days of summer – and, perhaps (as much as I hate to admit it), in the waning days of childhood.

It seemed unimportant that it was late and that it was fully dark outside. Next week brings the start of the school year and the return to more structure – classes, sports, homework – another year in the march toward adulthood.

For this late-summer night, I wanted to let them play as long as they could.

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 August 23, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

So Fast Summer

August sneaks up on me every year. In June, summer stretches before me like an endless daydream of carefree days, family adventures, sunshine and warmth. Then, suddenly, it’s August, and it feels like summer is coming to a screeching halt before it’s really even begun.

This summer has seemed to pass particularly quickly. It feels a bit like one of those days where you get to the end of it, flustered and exhausted, and wonder what the heck you did all day. But once you’ve had time to sit and reflect, you realize there was a lot packed into the day – or, in this case, the season.

During the first month of summer we had a revolving cast of visiting cousins in town, which made for days – and nights – that were fun, to be sure, but also sometimes hectic and amorphous. We loved the quality cousin time, but never really got into our own summer swing of things.

For the first time since the kids were toddlers, we also didn’t take our annual week-long pilgrimage to the ocean. We’ve had lots of shorter adventures that have all been a blast, but without that week of beach time marked on the calendar, summer has seemed a little off, I guess.

And don’t even get me started on the garden. Oof. Busy June weekends, on top of some pretty miserable early summer weather, thwarted all my good intentions of getting the vegetable gardens planted early. The perennial bed is a disgraceful tangle of weeds with the occasional sturdy bloom poking through.

Still, my flower boxes are overflowing with color. And the small plots I managed to sow – late as it was – with veggie seeds are producing well, keeping us in beans and carrots, cukes and zucchini, beets and more kale than I know what to do with. It all makes me think it’s simply time to cut back on the size of both gardens for a while.

Despite missing our Cape week – and the fact that it took us to the end of July to get to our first big hike of the summer – the adventures we have had have been fabulous. We’ve gone glamping and mountain biking, camping and kayaking, climbed a few tall mountains and splashed in our favorite spots along cool rivers. I’m still holding out for a few days at the ocean – and a few more hikes, bike rides, and trips to the pool and the river.

I guess that’s the upside of August hitting so hard – realizing summer isn’t really forever, and that it’s wise to fit as much of its goodness in before the days shorten too much more, before the kids are swallowed up back into the school year, before we move on – ready or not – to the next season. 

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 August 9, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

The Good Ones

Too late, I remembered I was chewing gum. I’d already taken my seat in Ms. Spinney’s classroom when I realized the gum was there. I looked at her, she looked at me. She never said a word, but I knew I’d be served a detention slip the next morning. It didn’t matter that I was a good kid and a good student. The rules were the rules, and in Ms. Spinney’s class gum-chewing was not allowed.

This sophomore-year incident popped into my mind this week when I heard that Ms. Spinney had died. And from that one memory, my thoughts wandered to other teachers I remember from my years of schooling, long ago as they sometimes seem. I couldn’t tell you the name of every grade school or high school teacher or college professor I ever had – or every specific lesson I learned from them – but I remember many of them. Mostly the Good Ones.

I remember Mrs. Forsythe from first grade and that I was happy my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Petersen, moved on with me to teach my third-grade class, too. I remember being nervous to start at a new school in sixth grade, when my Hastings School class would merge with the Fales School kids.

I remember Mrs. Cowles teaching us The Preposition Song in English class that year. Three decades later, I can bust out all the prepositions – alphabetically and to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy – whenever I feel in danger of ending a sentence with a preposition. We also learned to diagram sentences with Mrs. Cowles – do kids even do that anymore? – and, when we really caught onto something, she’d tell us, “Now you’re cooking with gas!”

In high school, in a classroom with an impressive collection of wind-up toys, Mr. Sharpe lit the writing fire in me during creative writing class. In Mr. Kasierski’s biology class I learned to dissect once-living beings (ick), but also to look closely at the natural world, to notice the details there among still-alive things.

Mr. Mullen introduced us to classic American literature. I couldn’t tell you every book we were assigned to read that year, but I still have the journals we had to keep as part of our classwork. And I can picture Mr. Mullen acting out the scene in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” when Stanley leans back, full of angst, and hollers, “Stellllaaaaaa!”

Ms. Spinney walked us through contemporary history. By the time our class arrived, she’d already been teaching for more than 30 years. History, of course, had shifted in those decades – although I imagine the challenges of engaging a group of teenagers in what they likely considered ancient history remained similar through the years.

I don’t remember, all these years later, which exact periods or topics we covered. I do remember Ms. Spinney using Billy Joel’s newly (in 1989) released song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a lesson. If you don’t remember the lyrics – or have never heard it – look it up. It offered a timeline outside of, but related to, our stagnant textbooks. I’ve always thought that was an ingenious bit of teaching.

Miss Spinney retired many years ago, but in the town where she grew up and lived her whole life, she remained involved in mentoring young people through some of the challenges of school and adolescence. She was one of the Good Ones – even if she did give me one of the two detentions I earned in four years of high school. (I never flubbed and chewed gum in her class again.)

I think teaching is probably harder work than anyone who has never been a teacher realizes. It’s a big responsibility to have a hand in shaping young minds. But what a tradeoff, to know that if you do it right – if you’re one of the Good Ones – a few of the lessons you’ve shared along the way might just come happily to some former student’s mind many years down the road, many miles from the classroom. 

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 July 26, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.