The Slow Way: Co-remembering and Changing Seasons

How do we practice wisdom when seasons change, and we ache for what used to be?

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

A couple of weeks ago, for my “Poetry Thursday” segment on Instagram, I read a poem by Cathy Song called “Waterwings.” In it the speaker watches her son swim with his floaties strapped to his arms, “waterwings he calls them.” This is a poem I’ve been paying attention to for twenty-three years, since long before any babies of my own came out into the bright world. Even when I was twenty and reading it in my summer undergrad “American Women Poets” class, I found this poem mesmerizing. “The water from here seems flecked with gold. / I watch the circles / his small body makes . . . His imprint on the water / has but a brief lifespan, / the flicker of a dragonfly’s wing.”

I come to the last stanza, after the speaker has described the beauty of her son’s movement through the water, wings skimming the surface, and find myself devastated every time she concludes, “This is sadness . . . / the moment he chooses to leave his wings behind, / because he will not remember / that he and beauty were aligned…” 

He won’t remember. Recently Chris read an article that talked about one’s partner as being a “co-rememberer,” and I can’t shake that description. The thing is that being a co-rememberer, whether it’s in sharing memories with your spouse, or holding memories for a child or parent or friend, is a heavy calling. It hurts because eventually time changes and the co-rememberer becomes the only rememberer. 

The suffering a parent feels when their child grows up past their waterwings is not just the growing out of innocence or sweetness or no longer needing our help. It’s a loss of the memories. For the parent, there are memories that the child has forever released: those moments of magic, chasing the toddler around the living room, giggles bouncing off the walls. Or the kids in the bathtub together painting their faces with bubble beards. What was magic becomes lost in the past. Children become adults and only a few of those moments remain as memories. Only the co-rememberer holds the truth of the moment when “he and beauty were aligned.” 

This seems especially true for me right now as we move (finally, on the east coast!) toward the start of school. There was a legit chill in the air this week when I woke in the mornings, a promise that no matter how hot and dry this past month has been, there is something new coming. This weekend we’ll hit the pool for one last hurrah, then lay out our first-day clothes, pack up the waterwings. Nine more months before we need our swimsuits again. 

I was lucky enough to have a quick trip to San Francisco last weekend to send my former pastor, Fred, off to his new adventures. Fred started our church out of his living room back in 1997, and last Sunday he stepped away from his role as senior pastor. We gathered for a bittersweet blessing of Fred, me joining with other elders and congregants who had helped shape our church over the past twenty-six years. My season of serving as an elder was the hardest of my life. Leading a church is not for the faint of heart, especially when you’re on a board that chooses to embrace a new and contentious theological shift. The challenges of the past decade in my church were intense. And that season was rich, full of heartbreak, prayer, forgiveness, and hard-won commitment. Fred was a co-rememberer with me for all of it. And I was grateful to be there to send him off, standing with people who have shaped me, and who are moving forward with the church, even as my time there is officially over. 

And as I sat in the room where I spent so much of my thirties, chasing my kids up and down the aisles, serving communion up front, speaking to the congregation about budgets and theological shifts, and seeking to hold everything together when so much felt fragile, I was reminded of Cathy Song’s waterwings, how when we leave the beautiful, hard thing behind, sometimes the thing we beheld never even remembers how beautiful it was. 

When our family visited San Francisco last spring, it was the first time we had stood in our church since the Ash Wednesday service in late February of 2020, when we sat with the chairs in a horseshoe shape, the lights dim, while the kids lit candles in the middle, putting out their flames in the dirt there to remind us that we were dust. Ace had found his favorite honorary uncle, Jared, and held on to him the entire service. Of course, we didn’t know what would come: the lockdown of the world, the year of virtual church and virtual school, our family’s decision to move across the country without ever really getting to say goodbye. 

I guess this was my goodbye. Looking around the room for all the faces that weren’t there, wishing for one moment to remake the scene, to rewind ourselves ten years back to see four-year-old August wandering the aisles to find me on a Sunday morning, Brooksie a toddler chunk on my hip, the faces of friends who will never all be in the same room again standing around me. 

What I’m trying to say is: It’s almost fall. The wind moves through and we shiver. The boy in the pool who leaned back and moved his arms across the surface, a brief lifespan of gold across the water. He will get his back-to-school hair cut, throw on his backpack, and grow out of his hand-me-down jeans. And the world will shift on its axis, drawing us gently into a cool sunshine, apples in our u-pick bags. There’s no fighting the autumn, friends. It always comes for us. 

The Psalmist tells us that “all our days pass away . . . Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” 

The answer to that reality? “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” There is a slowness in numbering our days, in choosing our co-rememberers, in celebrating the movement of time in all of its beautiful, achingly true reality. Babies grow up. Churches change. We live in one place full of gray fog and eucalyptus trees for a decade and then, whoosh, it’s gone. Now I wake up in a blue house, fog-free, in a town I’d never heard of three years ago. And all of this is wisdom, how we watch the magic when it's taking form in front of us, how we mark the moments before the change, and how we lean into the cool breeze when autumn comes for us. As it always does.

A Slow Practice

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” 

Let’s practice numbering our days together. Pull out your journal. I want you to write down three meaningful memories that formed you, memories that you share with another person, as a co-rememberer. Your co-rememberer may still be able to hold that memory with you, or they may no longer be able to share it with you. 

Write underneath the memory about why you chose it: What made it formative for you? What does that memory spark inside you? How might that memory be able to teach you wisdom? 

Now let’s carry those memories into prayer. 

Take a deep breath with me: Breathe in, Breathe out.

Close your eyes Imagine the scene for each of your memories. Can you hover over the memory in your imagination? What do you notice? What about the scene feels new to you when you look at it from this side? 

Now open your eyes. Look at what you wrote beside your memories. What rises to the surface for you when you consider why these particular memories matter. Are you grateful? Are you nostalgic? Do you feel regret? Do you ache for what once was? 

Take time to say those things aloud in your prayer. Receive the wisdom that comes with numbering your days, with marking the changes of your life. Can you simultaneously say thank you, and also release what’s in the past? 

Close with this prayer: Spirit, the world is sometimes trouble and sorrow, and sometimes it’s perfectly magic. Thank you for the days I’ve been given. Teach me to see my life with the perspective of the wise-ones. 

A List of Things:

• Here’s my reading of “Waterwings” by Cathy Song

• You can find the poem in her book Frameless Windows, Squares of Light.

• This opinion piece in The Washington Post, “Trump should fill Christians with range, How come he doesn’t?” is long but worth it. 

• Here’s another daunting piece, this one from Plough, asking whether too much liberty might actually be hindering our country’s pursuit of human flourishing. For those of us flabbergasted at the state of political discourse in America, this might be helpful. 

• I’m currently reading a middle-grade novel called The Inquisitor’s Tale, which takes place in 13th century France, and is full of adventures for three magical kids and their holy dog. Its illustrations are in the style of illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages and it’s altogether lovely. 

• Happy Labor Day, friends! Hope you catch the last of the sunshine and all its magic.