Family Moab

Family Moab
In Arches National Park

Monday, August 1, 2022

Wake Up Now!

 “Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”

― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Summer slithers by like a young child on a wet slip-and-slide, now catching on a rubber wrinkle, but then writhing free and rocketing out of my grasp. It's only been a week since Rob's 5-0 shindig and we just finished the last of the caterer's leftovers - the extra beer and cocktail cans are still sweating it out on the porch in their cooler - but experiences continue to pile up like the faded geranium petals in my planters.

William attempted last-minute camping with friends and ran into two persnickety Colorado problems: finding an available campsite and having an off-road-worthy vehicle. They solved both problems and finally set up the tent in pitch dark, only to shiver the night away thousands of feet in elevation higher than they had planned to sleep.

Meanwhile, Rob and I went to see Los Lobos and the Trucks + Tedeschi band at Red Rocks, a spectacular venue we hadn't visited since pre-pandemic times. Tailgating in the red dust of the parking lot with old friends, chatting about retirement dreams and menopausal challenges while drinking and looking out over the foothills and the city floating away on the plains, we thought, "here we are again, at last!"

The annual family camping trip beckons this weekend, a trip promising more normalcy than we could deliver in the last two years. In 2020 we went and tried to stay at arm's length, as no one yet even trusted the outdoors, until the cold evening drove us into a huddle around the campfire (no COVID resulted). Last year nearly every family had a college freshman planning dorm move-ins and the trip was abbreviated with many folks only tripping up for the day. This year we plotted a farther drive and a longer stay, scheming way back in February to reserve our 7 sites for this weekend and persuade our adult children to drive down with us for the full three days.

Each sunny-bleached moment of the summer seems familiar but different, as if I'd heard the melody before but it's now in a different key. I don't know if the pandemic altered our routines or the passage of years has changed the way I perceive things, but as school beckons from it's start date in three weeks, I'm startled and challenged. As Ozeki says, 'Wake up now! And now! And now!" For soon it will be gone again.

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