Guess Who's Back

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The college students are back. They move in packs throughout the neighborhood, hordes of awkward, hungry eighteen-year-olds crowding the corner ice cream shop.

I love this time of year. Maybe it’s because my dad was a professor, so I grew up on college campuses and the return to school hits me in the most tender, nostalgic part of my heart. There’s just something about an overwhelming mass of young people descending upon an area at the start of a new school year that feels good to me. Every year that I age, they look more like children, but still, here they are, a new crop of young adults, ready to start the rest of their lives.

During our last two years of college, my now-husband and I (and five other inexplicably messy, but wonderful men who I still love to this day and deeply miss seeing regularly) lived in a house that butted up to a parking lot that was across the street from the spot where the football’s marching band practiced. On Saturdays in the fall, the band would gather early in the morning to run through their routine one more time before that afternoon’s game. The sound carried up and in through the window of the attic that served as our bedroom and we would wake to the noise of drums and horns. It would be fair to assume that I found it obnoxious to be greeted at dawn by the sound of the university’s fight song, but in truth, I loved it. It felt special and uniquely collegiate, the air vibrating with anticipation and excitement.

This past weekend, we moved the baby into his own room. Five months in, I was starting to get the sense that my presence was waking him up at night more often than he needed to be. Moving from one sleep cycle to the next, he would catch my scent, and the primal wolf cub part of him believed it was time to eat. It has been three nights and so far his sleep stretches have progressively lengthened. I feel more rested. More human. The best part is having our bedroom back to ourselves. My husband has spent the entire time since the baby was born sleeping on a futon upstairs so our older son didn’t feel like he had been cast off to the far reaches of the house all on his own. Now the upstairs is The Brothers’ Domain, and my husband and I are free to move about downstairs without having to speak to each other in hushed voices. I can read in bed at night, instead of quietly slipping into a dark room and crossing my fingers that the baby doesn’t sense my presence like some freakishly attuned zombie in a post-apocalyptic horror movie. Everything is back where it’s supposed to be. No more living out of laundry baskets. No more having to guess ahead of time what we might need in the evening and making sure to grab it from the bedroom before the baby goes down to sleep.

It is icing on the cake for me that this transition is occurring at the same time as the return to school, and as fall (though, granted, still off in the distance), slowly begins to slide into focus. The points in the year when the seasons start to turn over are my favorites. They always feel like a fresh start, a welcome moment of reflection. My son and I talk about what we liked best about summer and share what we are looking forward to this fall. (Him: swimming in the lake, and Halloween. Me: delicious, fresh tomatoes, and cooler mornings.) I would like to get back to running once the days have cooled off a bit. I am looking forward to indulging in cider donuts. I have a friend who I meet up with every couple of months. We go walking and chat about our kids and our work projects. She wears the best sweaters in the fall. Some people are made for certain seasons and she has always felt like autumn to me, warm hues and a smile that commands your attention like a vibrant sugar maple.

I met her a couple of years after we first moved to Baltimore, back before either of us had children. She is a few years older than I am and her kids are a few years ahead of mine. I like having this example of what the not-too-distant future might hold. I like that we still come together, all these years on, and I can see the ways we’ve changed and aged, each of us a little softer, a little tired, yet somehow more at ease. Because she is usually already out—dropping her kids at camp or school—whereas I am home, my day beginning with the kind of wobbly start you come to expect with a baby, most often she comes down to my place to meet up for our walks. The past couple of times, we’ve gone walking through the college campus that is down the road from my house. It has been mostly empty—a few summer students here and there, a campus tour with a group of bored teens and dads wearing concert t-shirts for bands I grew up listening to, the occasional mother pushing a baby in a stroller. But the next time we go it will be full of students moving between classes, hanging out in the Adirondack chairs the university has set up beneath trees throughout the campus, walking in laughing, laidback groups on their way to the dining hall or their dorms. Those who miss their own pets will stop us and ask if they can say hi to my dog. We will marvel at how young they all look. “There’s no way we looked that young in college,” I will say, I always say when I see first-year students now. Just thinking about being back on the campus when it is full and bustling brings me joy.

I am shifting into the phase of life where my cohort’s parents are increasingly experiencing medical issues. Just this past week, I spoke to multiple friends whose parents have been in the hospital recently for reasons of varying severity and concern. I have heard people talk about this period, where you are sandwiched between the caregiving needs of your young children and your aging parents, but I wasn’t prepared for it to arrive so swiftly. The age at which my own children will be setting off for college is a long way away, and yet I imagine when the time comes, it too will feel like it has arrived quite suddenly, before I’ve had the chance to properly prepare.

On those Saturday mornings in college, we would wake to the sound of the marching band and head outside to begin parking cars for the game. We lived close to the football stadium and could make a decent bit of money by charging people to park in the spaces behind our house, along our driveway, and even, on occasion, in the front yard, sandwiched between a large tree and the house’s porch. We earned enough money each season to pay our utility bills and buy beer.

There is a part of me that misses the communal aspect of college life, all of us awake at all hours, hanging out and acting stupid. But for the most part, I am content to stroll through campus and view that period through the lens of memory. I prefer my own space and the quiet. I prefer the baby in his own room, both sons asleep upstairs in The Brothers’ Domain while I am spread out in my bed with a good book and my husband’s company, the sun fading from the sky earlier and earlier, the promise of fall on the way.

I want to share a poem from my friend Annie Powell Stone’s chapbook, Hampden Wildlife: Reflections on the Nature of a Baltimore City Neighborhood. I love how this chapbook details the part of the city where she and I both live with such specificity, but also beautifully captures more universal themes of parenting and aging, of longing for both solitude and recognition.

Hampden Wildlife is available from Bottlecap Press. With the code BTGO, if you purchase any two books or chapbooks from Bottlecap Press, you can get a third book for free (all three need to be in your cart for the discount to work). If you’d like to take advantage of this deal, I personally recommend getting Annie’s, mine, and Rachel Abbey McCafferty’s, The beginning the end the beginning the end the.

Thank you to Annie for granting me permission to share her poem, “sitting right with time,” which has really been speaking to a lot of what I have been thinking about and feeling this week.