Monthly Musing – August 2010 – Feeling the Sky

Have you noticed that the days are getting shorter, time is going faster and the school summer holidays will soon be over?  It’s always been said that time flies as you get older, but I don’t think of myself as particularly old and still the dates go by faster than I’d like.  I’m very lucky.  I’ve got a wonderful husband, two beautiful daughters and I live in Winwick; close enough to towns and motorways for when I need things, and close enough to the fields and trees to be distracted by rural views when I don’t.  And yet, despite not having to worry about school runs, lunch boxes and after school clubs at the moment, there still doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day for everything I need to do.  Housework doesn’t take a holiday.  Children need entertaining.  If anything, the workload increases – and then I remind myself of an article I read some years ago in a magazine.

The writer was relating an anecdote about her little boy.  He’d been lying on the grass, staring up at apparently nothing for such a long time that his mother became worried.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes Mummy,” came the reply.  “I’m feeling the sky.”

Feeling the sky.  Isn’t that a lovely phrase for doing nothing but savouring the moment?  It’s not always easy to remember to do when you’ve a hundred and one other demands on your time, but for me, it’s important to try.  Even just sitting down for a minute to drink my cup of tea gives me the chance to feel the sky, to savour the moment, rather than gulp it down on the run or find it half an hour later gone cold because I forgot about it as I was busy doing something else.

My big daughter is at high school now, and small daughter starts in reception this year.  It doesn’t seem like five minutes since big daughter  was standing in her first classroom in uniform that was far too big for her, and I know that it won’t seem like five minutes until small daughter is starting high school.  I’m trying hard this summer to remember to take time to watch them play instead of using every free minute to clean the house, tidy the garden or make that quick phone call that always takes longer than you think.  I’m writing down the things they say that make me smile or bring a lump to my throat, because all too soon they’ll be grown up and gone – and I’ll still have the housework to do but no young daughters to look after as they make their own way through life.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” asked small daughter, the other day.

“Checking my bank statement,” my husband replied.

“What for?”

He laughed.  “Because you and your sister are expensive.”

“No Daddy,” small daughter said, very seriously, “We’re not expensive, we’re precious.”

How right she is.