Dear S,
I assumed that somehow the Board of Ed’s website updated its calendar automatically whenever there was a snow day. When I checked it sometime in March, June 8th was marked with a star, so I told your stepdad that June 8th was your last day of school. Then he took two vacation days, June 8th and June 9th, with the idea that we would celebrate your completion of third grade and enjoy the first day of summer vacation together.
There’s a special reason he took those days, a reason that stretches beyond the simple fun of vacation days. Two years ago, after you’d completed first grade, you woke up in the morning, in our bed, because that’s where you slept, and sat up, confused as you watched M button up his shirt. I’m sure the sheets had left lines on your face, and I would bet that your hair stood on end. I know that your eyes brimmed with tears when you asked him, in your soft, little boy voice, “Why are you leaving? Today is the first day of summer vacation.”
The same thing happened the next year.
Your disappointment each time was palpable. It is hard to understand that the world does not follow the same calendar as elementary school. This was harder to understand because, at the time, I was in grad school and also on summer vacation. Of course the concept of him leaving every sunny day of the three-month stretch of summer was completely nonsensical to you.
And so, this year, he took those days off to surprise you. But this year I screwed up the dates. Your last day of school was actually June 14th.
We kept you home on that Friday anyway. And we kept our plan a secret from you. This year, on the morning of what was not actually the first day of summer break, you came into our room, bleary- eyed, hair on end, confused, and stood at the foot of our bed, because you sleep in your own room now, and with a slightly bewildered squeak asked us why we were still sleeping. “Is it…Saturday?”
***
Lunches were packed before noon. We stopped at Target before hitting the road, looking for sunscreen and a disposable camera. We found the sunscreen easily and had to ask someone where to find the camera. The guy behind the counter in the electronics department laughed. Disposable cameras are pretty much extinct. In fact, film photography in general is vintage, I think. But I wanted you to try it. I wanted you to capture these hikes in a way that will give you something concrete to look back on. I wanted you to learn about seeing something and capturing it through a lens and then having to wait to see how (or if) it comes out the way you’d hoped. I needed these images to be familiar, to be real, not on a phone, buried in data, stacked with intentions to print them but no real drive to do so. And I wanted you to have something that will remind you that when you were nine we had adventures and they were fun or challenging or beautiful or boring.
They only had an underwater camera and it was twenty bucks but we bought it anyway.
***
Southford Falls is about forty minutes from the mall where we bought the camera and I had recently found the Nintendo DS that had been misplaced in a bag of stuff that got shuffled back and forth between our house and your dad’s. You quickly reacquainted yourself with Pokemon as we drove inland to hike our first waterfall. Your stillness back there, in the back of our rustly old Jeep, your concentration, the way the tip of your tongue pokes out at the corner of your mouth, I know I should have been aggrieved by your penchant for technology, that I should’ve insisted that if we are going back to nature, you should unplug. But this time I don’t. You are beautiful.
***
My siblings and I weren’t allowed to have junk food very often when we were kids, and we certainly didn’t eat in restaurants. There were occasional trips through a drive-thru, clamoring kids anxious for the toys and cookies in our boxed Happy Meals, but any time we ate take out it was a very special treat.
Maybe I’m making this up, then. But I don’t think I am. After we pulled into the parking lot at Southford Falls, as you and M and I hopped out of the car and looked around at the pond and the field and the paths where I have been so many times before, where you have been twice before, where M has never been, I remembered KFC. Not the restaurant, but the time my dad brought the three of us kids (before Auntie Teesa was born) to this same place with a red and white striped bucket of fried chicken and a vat of mashed potatoes and a container of the too-peppery gravy that he loved. I think we sat on a blanket next to the picnic table, even though I remember that the picnic table was empty. I’m sure we stuck our feet in the cool pool of water on top of the rocky ledge where the first waterfall crashes and wiped our greasy chicken hands on our shorts.
***
Southford Falls is, in many ways, a collection of varying environments. There is a long pond filled with lily pads, where dragon flies hover and old men fish, which flows under a walking bridge before torpedoing over the rocky ledges of the falls. There is a meadow next to the pond that sort of swoops up the hill and ends abruptly at a line of dark and scrawny pines. That’s where the pavilion and restrooms are, in the clearing, away from the thickets of forest. The trail near the meadow, which runs next to the placid pond, leads directly to the watch tower.
We didn’t take that trail. We followed the water and then veered left up the hill. We made it to the watch tower, but it was harder than it would have been had we taken the traditional path. When you read Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” someday, remember that it is often misinterpreted. No matter which path you choose, you will think you’ve made a choice that has made all the difference. But the thing is, if you had chosen the other way, you would look back and say the same thing. Read the middle of the poem carefully- you’ll understand that the paths are the same and it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
***
The trail we took led us through the red-painted covered bridge. You snapped pictures of the graffiti etched and scraped into the wooden rails. The place where we veered left to find the tower was steep and lined with the gnarly branches of pink-blossomed mountain laurels. You lead the way and we stopped a few times, sweaty and thirsty, and I was waiting for you to quit. You didn’t.
We hunted for walking sticks in the dappled light of a flatter area that lead to the hill that lead to our destination. We found a tall one for M, one with a knob at the top for me, a shorter one without bark for you. Three bears in the woods, just right.
***
You were shocked and proud and awed when we reached the tower. I had forgotten how steep the steps are. On the floor, written in permanent marker, was this missive:
It is a slightly misquoted line of a Ginsberg poem entitled “A Supermarket in California.” I love this poem, though I didn’t recognize it right away that day. I will leave it here for you:
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when
Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
When we left the tower you had an idea. To leave our walking sticks at the bottom of the stairs in case another group of hikers wanted to borrow them. You arranged the three of them into a star on a concrete slab. 
Art.
Nature.
Motherhood.
the shape of me 