Back to School

Summer of Sixteen

Last day of August and my thoughts are on the first day of school.  This September my big lad will start Grade 11 and my wee lad will begin Preschool.....wait for it....big sigh....big gulp.  This was my eldest son's sixteenth summer.  Remember what you were doing the summer you were sixteen?  Gotta really think about that one.  Hmmm.....where was I and what was I doing?  I was here on Vancouver Island, working full-time in the local drugstore with my best friend from high school.  My paycheque was mine to spend on clothes, make-up and magazines.  If I wasn't working I was at the beach getting as brown as I possibly could.  There was a method to the madness that was my tan.....burn once, burn twice, peel for awhile and then eventually turn golden. My best friend lived in this really cool old house that used to be some rich family's holiday estate in the early twenties before it was turned into a resort.  The house had a kazillion bathrooms with clawfoot tubs and old fashioned fixtures and  her bedroom was like her own apartment.  It was miles away from the rest of the house and I remember a fireplace in her bedroom, not a working fireplace mind you, but a fireplace...it was VERY cool.  Her bathroom was just that...hers and hers alone.  Coming from a house with one full bathroom, a downstairs bathroom with a shower stall that resembled a metal coffin, and three other siblings to share it all with....I was in sheer heaven every time I stayed there.  The windows in the house were the old fashioned gabled kind with individual panes and underneath a row of them there was a window seat where we would read Glamour and Mademoiselle, paint our nails and gaze up at her David Lee Roth poster that leered down from the angled ceiling above us.  On hot summer days we would grab a blanket, our spray bottles of water for keeping cool, bottles of Sun-in to fry our hair along with our skin, Hawaiin tropic suntan oil, our Walkmans,  icy cold Cokes and crawl out her windows to climb up to the flat leveled roof above her bedroom.  With its pitch black tarred surface we were guaranteed a crispy Island gold tan in no time.
I wonder what memories my son's sixteenth summer will take with him into adulthood.  I've been privvy to a few of the highlights although I'm sure I don't know, and don't want to know, everything that went down these past two months.  He's made it through unscathed which makes me happy and is really all a mother can hope for I suppose.  Grade 11....wow....how did THAT happen? 
In the blink of an eye...he has gone from the preschooler his little brother is to the young man I see towering above me.  In the midst of caring for a toddler and a baby along will come my big lad, checking in from a day at the river with his buddies, racing in for a quick shower before he heads off to work, rushing through the kitchen grabbing a bite to eat before heading out to the shack we have for him just a few steps from the main house to play his guitar, coming up beside me to rest a hand on my shoulder to ask so sweetly "Hey Mom...think you could drive me to Dustin's?..pleeezze?". 
For all the tough days I have with my younger kids there is my big lad, a walking reminder of how fast it all goes, how quickly childhood is whisked away from us as parents, how much we will miss it all when it is gone.  His adolescence has a way of bringing me back down to earth when I have a tough day with a little boy and  a little baby girl.  Diapers and dilly dallying may drive me nuts some days but in the big picture that is raising kids it's really nothing.....and everything.  Happy first day back to school everyone.....enjoy...and take pictures!