Rolling

Roll into dark

Roll into light

Night becomes day

Day turns to night

It’s a lovely song we sing at Beth Am at the start of Shabbath on Friday evenings.  Watching the sun go down Friday night, focused to the west on the end of the secular day, I thought of this song and remembered to look east, to watch my world roll into dark. The Jewish day, from the first day of creation in Genesis, starts with evening.  And why not?  My mind tends to follow the sun, to focus on its rising and setting, its apparent path from east to west.  But if I keep my mind on the east it’s easier to remember that my stable little piece of the earth is rolling into dark and then into light.

Here on Sunnyhill the house is not just a clock, it’s a calendar.  Any house on the planet is, but it’s so much easier to see here with our huge views.  The sun rises in the bathroom window now, far to the north of where it rose in the bedroom when we moved here in January, a month after the winter solstice.  It’s not just the light that’s changed, it’s what we see.  Our world covered in growing things has such a different aspect from our world covered in snow.  The crows and turkeys have been joined by so many seasonal visitors, the geese, the robins, the swallows, the kingbirds, the herons, and on and on.  With the windows open on the warm days it’s noisy here – birdsong all day, frogs and peepers as night rises in the east.

My busy years are over, the years of building marriages, raising a child, working in the world, working at home, the years when I barely had time to think. Now, settled here on Sunnyhill with Jay and Charlie I have time to think about the planet we live on and how it moves in the solar system and in the universe.  I thought about this in the leisure of childhood, but rarely since then.  Perhaps it’s this leisure that is part of the bond between grandparents and grandchildren.

I don’t have a grandchild visiting me now, but Jonah Bailey, my great-nephew, was here for play and dinner yesterday. It’s a joy to see his parents, Zavi and Chris, but they have not changed as much in the last three years as Jonah has. I spent a week with him three years ago just shortly after his birth.  I was there to watch his first bath in the kitchen sink in Atlanta, to walk up and down the hall with him while his parents got a little break.  And here he is, a much bigger, competent person. He was delighted with Charlie, with Zen, with Jay’s brisket (his first) and with ice cream. Walking together after dinner, down the driveway and up Gulf Road a little way, he ran from Peter to Aviva to Chris to Zavi to me, threatening to catch each of us in turn and celebrating his triumphs with hugs. He’s a lovely boy. He has time to pay attention to birds and flowers, to learn their names with great intensity.  His busy years are still ahead of him.

I think about the grandchildren and their cousins a lot, especially the ones born in this century.  I think about the world they find and the world they will make. For me, it was the NAACP, and Silent Spring, and the revolution in computing and communications technology.  I was so lucky to be right in the thick of it as an adult in Silicon Valley, to get to teach secretaries how to use the early, awkward word processors and watch the typewriters disappear, to be part of the great experiments in how work would change. I can’t imagine the changes the little ones will see any more than my grandmother could have imagined my career. My leisure now comes at the end of work, and the little ones’ comes before it.

I’ve been so lucky to see so much of the world: Canada, Mexico, England, France, Greece, China, India, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, Bhutan, Panama. So many beautiful places. In South Africa we stopped overnight in the lovely little town of Langebaan on the Atlantic Coast. Joe and I had already fallen in love with South Africa by the time we got to Langebaan. Walking along the road in the peace of the evening, Joe, who never thought about retiring, said that he could imagine retiring there. It was unlikely, and as it happened, impossible. I’ve often thought about what drew him to that place, the proteas at the roadside, the baboons, the space and light of the Southern Hemisphere – all that grist for the photographer. That place allowed him to imagine leisure, something he rarely did. In the end, I have found my leisure here, in country not far from the country of my childhood. For Jay it’s a transplanting into new soil, and he seems to be putting down roots here.  For me, it’s a return, to familiar smells and sights and seasons, to attention to the rolling of the earth.