Lavender moments

I like those moments that I realise we have made into important and frequent parts of our days - of pure sensory enjoyment, of pause, of play, of opportunity for reflection.  

We find them intensely in our best embraces in the milonga, in conversation and walks with friends, in learning from or sharing with others.  We find them loving things, caring for things, in discovery:

Life is very largely lived in these special seconds or minutes.  They flare, exist briefly and vanish.

Many are things so simple and well known that they are indeed clichés: the pleasure of something beautiful, growing, or the smell of coffee or toast; the scent of sea on the air, being in sunshine or mist, listening to music we love, making something, helping someone. 

Some are completely personal. Our own this week have been finding new snowdrops, climbing a hill with a friend after school, impromptu enactments upon a rock of poems learned for school, making mug cakes! One that must be one of the world's best kept secrets, known only to a few, something that gives an instant glorious thrill: waving at traffic from a pedestrian bridge with children - or rather, when the drivers wave back or beep their horn. Don't knock it til you've tried it! Hugs, hugs holding hands with my children and more hugs; listening, sharing, walk and chat after school, swimming, nothing spectacular. We rarely go out for restaurant meals, we do not have family holidays abroad or go to Center Parcs, we don't have two cars or a lot of expensive gizmos.  The children like their home, they love seeing their friends and the organised activities they do are ones they have chosen, not ones they have been put in to.  

But we do have many local days out in nature or at National Trust or Historic Scotland properties, especially with friends. Speaking of holidays, "But you must take the kids on a trip?" said a puzzled Dutch friend.  "There must be some kind of family holiday?"  Seeing pictures of my kids walking locally with friends the same friend said "I should try to go further for walks...We often decide we should, but never really get around to it somehow.  Usually our household is too much of a dovecote."  But our home, though loved by the kids, feels less to me like a dovecote and sometimes more like a temporary, fairly chaotic basecamp from which reorganise for the next adventure.

Family holidays.  I sighed.  I go away after Christmas alone, to dance, largely because I want to still be a family come January. Besides that I feel pretty lucky we have a car and petrol that I can take the children out for day trips.  What do other people know really about our lives?  When I feel that rising sense to justify things I know it is already hopeless and that it oughtn't to be necessary.  Experience and common sense say how and why you live the way you do and make the choices you do are not topics up for discussion, not, at least, with more deftness than is common.  I thought how well I feel we know our region and the regions around us and to the question "But you must take the kids on a trip?" answered:  "All the time," thinking I had already said more than I cared to.

I realise, flicking through the photos how many of these moments we have, sometimes whole days of them month after month year after year and how lucky we are.   I think, anew how absurd the notion that your investment in your children could be measured in miles travelled, rather than moments and in time.   This (below) was probably Hampshire, but it is irrelevant and never more so than to them.  When you are channelling water and making dams with a new friend your geographical location really doesn't matter. 

I was glad to realise this early after having children.   I made this discovery after packing in so much when they were still babies and toddlers.  I realised the travel I took them on was for me and for Tiggy, the fantastic au pair we had for nine months after my youngest was born: a weekly escape into nature away from the baby clutter; or more accurately, for all of us, but not, in essence just for them.  What they wanted, still largely want, is undivided attention, regardless of where it is.   

I often ask the kids France or Italy? meaning a trip abroad. The little one has picked up beginners Italian from Duolingo.  They are persuaded momentarily by the thought of endless pizza, pasta and ice cream then lose interest.  Home, they say turning back to lego or some arms-around-each-other game.  I know the advantages of travel, including for children but why rush them, force them, why go against my instinct?

I realise as with the holiday abroad? question I am similarly needled when people ask "And what do you do?" "Nothing."  I say more often these days, thinking Nothing I want to talk about, nothing I want to justify.  Good  friends I have noticed understand, even speak up for me when I won't do it myself.  

For the children those moments are sometimes less about pause and reflection, and rather more dive and splash and race or the opportunity to share some burningly important fact that bursts from them in an explosion at the excitement of discovery:  "Did you know Emporer penguins can grow up to 1m tall?" "There is no water on Venus."  "Can trees see you?" "It’s OK to eat sandwiches and pizza with your hands."

Sometimes it's just (?!) ice cream!

Yesterday, reading a recent published set of tango music I could not remember how Fresedo's El Once goes. I was reminded upon search that there are three versions, all of which I have heard in the milongas. Out of idle curiosity I played the introductions to my younger son who was lingering over his tea. He participated willingly and with easy interest apparently considering such an activity entirely normal:

El Once, 1927  

El Once, 1935  

El Once, 1952  

After hearing them a few times without comment from me he swapped the 1927 (tango in its infancy) recording in favour of 1935 (tango coming of age) 
- Why? I said
- It's the most fun, he said  He is right!  But he preferred the 1952 version being "adventurous" and "exciting".  No Fresedo is good for dancing after 1941 for me, but choosing El Once from 1952 is probably just what you would expect, not so much in social dancers but in an exuberant, adventurous seven year year old boy who is rather like a fizz-popping firework or the kind of child who finds the world in general so marvellous he jumps up and down, quite literally for joy every day and in expression of that excitement.

Daniel Klein talks about these moments - which for want of a better name I have called lavender moments - that we savour with the coming of old age:

But wise writers advise over and over the centuries not to leave these realisations until it is too late.  Children, of course, do not - they are too busy living those moments.    Older people often realise how precious they are.  It is those of us inbetween so busy with trade and care, what others expect of us and our own pursuits who perhaps miss them.

A man with whom I danced in Nottingham last year said one of the loveliest compliments I remember from the milongas: You savour every moment, don't you. But if you are given these gifts what else would you do but recognise and enjoy them? 

It is not just the moments I enjoy in themselves.  I like that just the idea of lavender connects me with the story of an old man in Greece, an old man in America I will never meet, my own neighbour, Dutch gardens and my elder son who gave me a lavender bag he had sewn at school. "Only Connect!" said EM Forster.  "Live in fragments no longer."   So many things I find, connect.