Solstice

You know it’s been a weird year when you pick up your boy on the last day of school and he gets in the car carrying a bag of milk. That’s right. A pint of lunch milk, poured into a plastic bag. Chocolate, if you must know. It was double bagged so I guess there was some thought involved. Only later did I reflect on the potential mess and ensuing disaster udder boy would have been in had he dropped the bag of milk in the building. Already on thin ice after a tumultuous freshman year of high school (it doesn’t get any thinner), he is probably feeling as relieved as I am that it’s over. The longest year.

And now—the longest day. We are the closest to the sun we’ll get this year. Leaning at a tilt of 23.44 degrees toward our largest star, which is at its northernmost point in the sky and will appear to stand still (sol-stice…sun-stand) before reversing her course. Technically, the longest moment of the longest day in this, the longest year, came this past Monday at 3:43 p.m., when the travelling sun reached its zenith. I tell you what, we were already there.

Here at the Burk house we have reached that point at dawn and every day afterward with Will the milk-bag boy waiting on his new bike. June 20th. This was the date given two and half months ago when we broke down and ordered him a new mountain bike. A really new bike. As in, one of those not-yet-put-together, still-at-the-furthest-point-on-the-supply-line kind of bike—more wish than wheels. And up until this week it was barely a passing thought. Boy was busy. Spring soccer, odd jobs, camping trips, yard work, dog walks, you know? We’ve got a pandemic to come out of and that’s no quick or simple trip. This past season he joined the Henrico Mountain Bike team and has been riding his dad’s old Specialized (two years older than he is), so it’s not as though he’s been grounded. That, and slinging uncontained beverages through his school building. But now that school and other mixed bags are behind us, summer has freed her moorings and is cleared to sail—on a Giant 27.5″ Trance full-suspension mountain bike. Just as soon as they call us.

To temper his waiting, Will spends his day busy about the garage, which is accessed through the kitchen and a short set of three weary steps in our tri-level home. All day, the coming and the going and coming and going. Door thunks shut with every hour like a cuckoo. The sounds of banging, sawing and grinding are not near so alarming as the sight of him, out the window, toting the go-kart engine (without the go-kart) across the side year and into the garage. Ooooh, it’s a bad day to be a Briggs Stratton. Sure ’nuff, later that evening taking out the recycling (get it??) I see the modifications up close: to the back of his bike a little wooden shelf has been retrofitted, but instead of a milkcrate containing library books and a sling shot, it will hold the pull-cord motor for what has got to be the strangest turbo boost a mountain bike has ever known. Will that even work? I am not mechanically (or electronically or technological or, come to think of it any way inclined) to know. Main thing, it uses up the better part of the day, a commodity we have in plenty, and channels the insane hope overage boy is barely coping with.

He hardly needs the extra power. Just thinking about the new bike on its way to him has Will simmering with energy and excitement. Back in the day he would not be able to contain it. Disturbing Christmas melt-downs and birthday funks had us worried. Now, the obvious joy animates his face and has his mouth running at full tilt about the Fox Float DPS Performance rear shock and dropper posts and tubeless tires. Adrenaline leaks out his eyes as he speaks. The eight-year-old in him believes it is coming on the day they told him: June 20th. Boom, done! We were given that date months ago. Bikes are in high demand, so this is a pre-order. I’m pretty sure the date was given with the terms “the week of” and “sometime” attached to it, but boy has abandoned these qualifiers as unnecessary. June 20th got imprinted on his heart, and you go ahead and be the one to tell him otherwise. The five-year-old in him believes the “shipment” of several dozen earmarked bikes has only his name on it and will arrive and be ready to ride in an hour. Probly even standing in our driveway, with streamers on the handlebars. The 10-year-old in him sets an alarm clock so he can be ready at 9 a.m. for a ride to the bike shop or a phone call that it’s in, if he must settle for me to take him, should his teleporter be down. He insists that not another thing can happen on Monday June 20th. The 14-year-old emails and calls the bike shop daily with questions, and the man in him, for there is one, takes the news “maybe later this week” in stride and, without saying a word, goes out to re-clean the spotless garage and touch up the homemade bike stand that will soon hold his pride and joy.

All week he has waited, cycling through giddy excitement to tense abiding to open moping to sort of a sick- looking worry. Does he fear it won’t come? There are a lot of container ships, I learn, dumping their contents into the sea these days. Lots of shipping disasters to contend with. Never mind stuck in canals. Lots of supply line talk and speculation. It is not a great time to be in the want or the wait of something on order; doors or bathtubs, pick-up trucks or bikes—the pandemic has messed with the smooth convey of A to B and “tracking” has become a euphemism for “yeeaah right.” I will not be the one to present these realities to a boy waiting on his wheels. I am, however, a practical woman, and once I realize the full power behind that firehose-level hope and happiness gushing out of him I hook up a great many chores and tasks to it: “Hey, Will!” (oh, silly mommy, singin’ the “Whydoanwe” song) “Why doan we”… clean your room…take down the tent…pack for camp…poke bamboo rods up our fingernails…?” He is too worn out to laugh, or really register my task attack on the situation. After a few days I stop pushing. Up until then, Boy had his own motivator humming along quite nicely. The beginning of the week, he cleaned half the garage, swept the floor, laid a carpet, outfitted his shop, and cleared his work bench, upon which he built a perfectly serviceable bike stand out of scrap plywood and a length of PVC. Spray painted it as well, red and blue. It stands empty, willing and waiting like a little solider in his spotless shop. “Don’t be puttin’ your junk here, mom,” he says, proudly displaying the half, or maybe half of a half of the garage that has been deemed his. Around him every square inch, nook, cranny, shelf is crammed with the j**k of his father, but Will is content in this little carved out corner that will be his new bike shop.

On the longest day of the year, Will cuts the grass twice. Once for a neighbor, once for us. I notice he takes his time, slowly circling the house, cutting slow and close to the brick edging of my gardens or the patio so he won’t have to take the weed whacker out afterward. He cuts the front bank, down by the mailbox—really you don’t get lawn service this fine anywhere. I’m glad to think of his contracted job down the street receiving the same level of care and detail. But I know that the fuel in this equation is his waiting. Inside he is on fire for that bicycle, so badly I worry it will skew the results on his daily temperature check. We are in the five-day countdown to High Adventure Camp, and my suddenly unwilling boy scout no longer wants to go. Bad case of bike fever. “What! Will, it’s the 4th largest adventure camp in the world! They have mountain biking.” He is nonplussed. “I know but it’s not my mountain bike,” says the one who has at times in his young life slept with (a) a new skate board (b) a tennis racquet and (c, when very young) new shoes. This boy attaches. Which is, I guess, all things considered, matched with all that the pandemic has sunk, lost, and/or forever flung into the cosmos of never again, a good thing indeed. I’m counting it in the plus column that the boy can even raise enough emotion to be euphoric—and also deeply, deeply pained. Did I just say that? Because abiding said pain has made me want to ride off the edge of the known world. I’m not sure how much more I can take. As the week flows inexorably toward this hard stop of camp, I too, grow sick with waiting. Will he even have one full day to ride it?

I’ve had a couple of waits myself recently. Haven’t we all, after the “longest” year of our lives? That’s what it’s called in retrospect, right? The year that was really 15 months old? That first month of March that lasted 45 days and the ones following that had no end because the calendar had blurred, been stripped, or been chucked entirely for waistband-less living. Most recently we had our two year-wait on Camille, our little French buddy, come to a crushing halt when his VISA waiver got declined. Really? Not Covid antigen tests, not the vaccine, not expense or unavailability of flights, not even the most likely development of all—too old or grown apart to consider it—we clear all these hurdles and still, still it is not to be. Ce n’est pas possible, writes the father after a hurried Facetime call (yes, from France!) in the Food Lion parking lot. Thanks, U.S. Department of Homeland security. In the same week we were also losing grip on another exciting possibility of a different French boy needing a family for a ten-week stay right up to Will’s birthday. After our initial “WOW!” I decided a summer such as this one is the perfect time to map a brother/French boy into our lives again and attached to the idea as quickly and deeply as my son is currently yearning for this bicycle. Had a place saved for him at camp, had a plan, had all but the Nutella and the flavored water drops on the shelf. Silly mommy. And then, the end of both in the same 48 hours. That waiting, and that ending, was a hard one deep below the surface of things. Now, today comes the waiting all can relate to: the child- driving-on-highway-from-states-away-headed-home waiting. Sophie, en route from Georgia by way of…er, Roanoke? By my calculations she’s been in the car about 11 hours now, finishing up a road trip to see a roommate. Left a week ago from the northwest corner of VA and picked up friends for a midsummer jaunt to Georgia. Now, though this is NO BIG DEAL (voice of all the 8 and 10-year-olds out there) my maternal insides are just starting to simmer with that desperate urge to—well, to remake the universe. I know Boy shares that desire right now as well. If only someone had asked me, bike would be in our garage and girl would be on her bed posting trip photos. The world should consult me more.

On the last day of this year-long week, I notice our phones strategically placed about downstairs, with the ringers turned up high as they go. Both landlines, his cell phone and mine. I can see he’s done something to the bluetooth on my settings so it will what—ring in his room? I can’t tell. He asks only half joking if we can switch sim cards so they’ll call his phone instead. Though I am unwilling on that one, I realize how much of the electric excitement has been transferred boy to mom. I am still able to attend chores and speak in full sentences but I must say my thinking is fractured, my focus ping-y. I feel strangely unable to move in a radius of more than 50 feet from my cell. Takes me right back to those Copperhead days at our house, when they played outside all the day long and I put myself at the ever-ready, purse and keys by the door with a charged phone nearby, making sure I had my teeth brushed and a bra on for that quick sprint to the ER. “So, mom,” says the boy, making conversation while we cool our heels, “so, what would you need to do; like, how long would it take you, if they called, like, right now?” I eye my keys, purse, water bottle and mask laid out on the kitchen counter, the six steps from there to the door.” He likes my answer. Something settles in him as he eyes my little pile and knows what I have been aching with all week, what every scolded, grounded, micro-managed, pestered kid needs to know at the end of each and every day: She’s. On. My. Side.

I would say I walk along side this boy of man-to-be, but today…he ain’t walkin’—and I can’t keep up with the changes in him. My epic soundtrack playing in the background isn’t helping anything, either. (See Spotify Girl May 2021). We both feel brought to the end of the universe. To compound the problem, lazy-in-the-kitchen boy has eaten only carbs all morning so he’s twitchy and pinging. “Will! Easy on the donuts.” I make him come to the table, sit still long enough to get a little lunch in him. The haunting, hyped-up “Chevaliers de Sangreal” from The Davinici Code playing loudly over my kitchen-busy morning. By that I mean loudly. “Well, ok,” observes boy, staring at his lunch on the plate, and I can’t tell if he means the music or his emotional state: “my butt’s vibrating.”

At any moment I will have to leap up, grab those keys and be ready for the ride to the Richmond. In this time of waiting, a “couple days” has stretched into a week, the hours ticked by so loaded with hope they now hurt, causing close to physical pain as he drags them through my suggested activities. He stopped short at reading a book and drew the line (although I saw him waiver for a moment) at baking brownies for Sophie’s homecoming. It’s been a loooooong week. Yesterday he ate four doughnuts in the span of an hour and managed to show up for family dinner wearing a sort of weary grin such as you might wear receiving surprise visitors while sporting a migraine. Today he and I don’t speak at all, we just pass by each other in a perfectly silent house, make eye contact and he is brought to smile and shake his head—weary, sheepish, waiting. A spam call or an ill-timed ring from Sophie have us both leaping for the phone(s). I know he can’t stand another minute of it and neither can I. I am done with my half-hearted advice, “Don’t worry, son, they’ll call soon….I’m thinking you’ll get a call this afternoon…. Any minute now that phone is going to r—“

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