The woods are the way I remember–not like they’ve been waiting 30 years for me to come back, but close. Still and yellow, falling light sharded between the trees lining the paved path that winds along a forest stream. Mom and I, on a glorious fall afternoon, are on a quest to find an old swimming hole and family gathering spot deep in the woods of our past. It gives texture and purpose (and argument) to an “old home” weekend of sorts. We tried this summer with two run-ahead kids and failed. We tried at the snail’s pace and stooped gait that is our lot these days. And even though it eluded us, it was fun to see the rocks and rambling waters of that stream running through the woods right where I left it three decades ago, and try to dredge up detailed memories of our time there–leaps from a rusted iron bridge and the time we camped overnight and the time our grade school principal–apparently, my memory is foggy on this one–took us for a nature hike to the state forest in a bus and then had us–an entire class of grade school children–walk the four miles back down the hill to the school. On a highway!! Life, still lived. Eat your heart out, SOLs!

Today, the light is fading and the damp forest air is creeping up from the undergrowth. I have the sense at the pace we are moving, that it might beat us to the swim hole. And certainly back to the car. It curls the leaves and mossy carpet of the forest floor and silvers the birches in the fading light, and though we’re warmly dressed we both left mittens back in the car and mom, she is not moving quickly. It’s not a cane, she assures me, it’s a ski pole. Clearly. And clearly we are not some wacky mother-daughter odd couple out on a fool’s errand late in the day, we are Patagonia-clad fitness buffs out for training. The trees hide their disbelief, and wear instead a warm welcome, urging us on. We make our slow parade through a million memories like the fallen leaves. The brook is not low, not spring-high either; it peeks out along the path telling me how cold she is and trying to remind me of all those lazy summer days our barefooted bodies skipped from one rock to the next in the bright sun. It’s marvelous to be in these woods, instead of all the other places life takes me, and I let the moments wash over me like a fuller stream, savoring all that is in it–the layers, the decay and the regrowth, the change. Life is a feast of change and in this I have most decidedly overeaten.

It’s my “homecoming weekend” — seven Octobers now, from the first when we came to honor dad. It’s very strange. I am a middle-age mom. I do not frequent airports or shuttle buses. When I go through TSA I do not have clutches of electronics to produce and show, but I do lock up the scanner with organic cake mix. I pack bags and hop a plane like the 20-year old traveling girl I fancy I am, carrying home a girl even younger, and yet when I arrive the houses are smaller, the woods are deeper, thicker, and I am middle-age. Time machine, take all of me, not just my surroundings. Mom and I do fall things in an Autumn tableau that could be a Keats poem–we lunch at a roadside produce stand and sit on a sunny patio overlooking an orchard, squinting, basking, letting the warm sun percolate our layers. We eat stuff with three and four names– “apple walnut butternut soup” and drink warm spiced cider in the brisk bright day. We tour art galleries set up in barns (yes, stone fireplace and yes, crackling fire), and we drive along backroads leaving a wake of paper yellow dancing in the road behind us.

I always come “home” with a list longer than we accomplish (exactly, so why leave?), but this trip is really about spending and savoring time, something very different from being home. At home, of course, I burn it like rocket fuel to get me where I’m going. Here, the fire burns without consuming and the layers have fair made life (the remembering it more than the living of it) into an art. The Connecticut hills are on fire with the ending year, an explosion of gold and orange made more vibrant by the late afternoon sun. The alignment of the hour of day with the time of year and (let’s face it) the late afternoon of life is not lost on me, and it all seems such a rare and warm invitation to en-joy. To en-gender the rich authenticity of this season in life. Age has about it an eloquence most welcome. I was never one for modern meaninglessness, anyway.

Observe: In the juxtapositions that are more alive than life itself, I enjoy a homecoming weekend with college girl, my daughter, the week before. Hopping off the train she does, with a day pack for a three-day stay, looking light years changed and yet, the same. The kitchen comes alive with her baking, then cleaning. She washes every dish, wipes the counters, makes my kitchen sparkle to Camp Hanover standards. Then she retreats to her own room, well-thinned and tidied (thank you, daughter), the chosen treasures of her childhood still parked about. She will never live in this house again, but for close to two decades she brought it joy. I have put flannel sheets on her bed for the coming cold, and she will complain with the rest of them about the damp cold of life in a brick home with stingy parents. She will have forgotten about this feature from being in an overheated dorm that I am paying to burn up. It’s so cold upstairs you can see your breath sometimes, and your hands get cold holding pages or tapping at keys. Pulling out and donning like a street beggar the spare articles of clothing she left behind, she will retreat, and want to be left alone, and not want to be boxed in or planned for or corralled. She will take a wonderful late afternoon walk with me around the block in beautiful fading sunlight, but it is homage and respect that propels her, and not the true desire to get exercise. Thank you, daughter.

Then she will go back to school where it’s clear her real life lives now and send me fun texts and photos of what it means to be alive in the world as a student, when every idea glistened like gold, and somebody paid for you to go about stringing them together and spinning out papers that in their done brilliance dazzled even you. I do miss the student life as I savor it vicariously from the little scraps she feeds me. I want to be the trees, still and steadfast, waiting when she comes home to look for past memories. I want to be the path that leads her along the most familiar roads, a teleology of the heart. I want to be the spring of her childhood buried deep in a timeless wood. Mostly having her home is a glimpse in the mirror. I was that college girl, coming home. It is over thirty years ago now. I don’t know which is more fun: to play an old tape or to be one for someone else. Here I am, daughter, sowing the seeds of your (some day) middle age musings. When I put her back on the train with all the prayers for her safety, I have to say I envy the journey.

Weekend before that is high school “homecoming,” with other daughter and her tidy, pretty crowd who haven’t a clue why a random fall weekend in October warrants all that fancy dinner and finery, tons of fuss and money spent. None of the other weekend football games have that. But they like the finery and the money part, and all the paparazzi. Their culture has taught them to pause, pose and smile while the camera rolls. It’s the fall of senior year for Sophie and if the roof don’t blow off at some point, well we shall just barely make it through. She and her other senior friends are a little oblivious to the whole “homecoming” concept; they can’t wait to get the heck away (bankroll included, of course), and can’t think why on earth a young adult such as themselves would want to come home, anyway. They are all, from the sense of it, just biding their time.

It is this group that turns the camera on itself too soon. If you talk to an under 20 these days, or try to, it is if they have a nervous tick distorting their face and glitching their expressions; then you realize they’re actually snapping candid shots of their own face from weird angles. And sharing them. Constantly. Pouting…Mouth open in mock surprise…Sticking out tongues. Then, as if these little gems aren’t unflattering enough you can apply dog ears and a freckled nose or grossly distort the features to something unrecognizable. While sitting in advanced calculus. On a $600 cell phone. And other mindless culture tricks. Lawd a mercy, I am OLD! The gap is huge. Sophie’s cell phone buzzes as though it’s alive and every few minutes she makes a face and clicks a screen shot. You have to feed it, this ravenous monster, spontaneous and purposefully unflattering photos (I think it’s even called a “feed”) in order to keep it alive. This weekend there will be reams of photos of teens in their finery all done up for a “homecoming” dance for the set who can’t imagine about coming home. Who needs it? The irony looms large over the finished work: the “connectedness” of social media, the flimsy beauty of lovely people posing in lovely ways and posting vapid things. I hope they know to enjoy the moments as much as the photo shoot and I hope they know their roots and I hope….What I really hope is that they know their way home.

What will she leave behind when she blows out of here in a year? What will she leave tucked about her room that will comfort and restore her for those college homecomings? Does she know you can strip down too thin and that it’s the layers that give texture and meaning to life? Don’t be in such a restless rush, I want to post. Insta-hooey, I want to tell them. Anything that vanishes that quickly couldn’t be worth posting to begin with. And hey let’s talk, not “chat.” For goodness sake. Seriously? Time was meant to be spent, not faced.

You don’t know it when you look out that kitchen window on the backyard swings and games or hear them laughing in a room upstairs. You don’t realize that is the music of their youth and the prelude of their leave-taking. You don’t realize what is so alive and bursting to be free even then, that nascent autonomy, because you are noticing their growth from one size to the next, buying the shoes and the bigger coats, marking the advancement of breasts and of braces. So much change. But is there from the beginning that feist that never settles, never relents: the seeds of their autonomy. Even now, mom and me, two old gray hairs in the front seat of her Prius and me driving (ostensibly) while she comments on my speed, my turns, my tailgating, my acceleration, everything! I am 53 years old!! [Weeping hysterical emoji icon here, please.] She comments on the road as well, warns me about pot holes that have been there as long as there’s been hair on my head and breath in my body and tricky turns that have been there longer. Seriously? Gently, I remind mom that these days I am a passenger in a car driven by a seventeen year old, and though I have been driving twice as long as she–daughter–has been alive on the planet (TWICE!!) I would not breath a word, not a word as to her driving. Wisdom, woman. And timing. Together these two adult you. But not time.

At last we find what we are looking for, mainly because both of us separately were determined not to stop walking until we did. It is now quite dark, and yep, quite cold. But there it is, little destination of four decades ago: a slumped gathering of boulders the glaciers brought here millions of years ago, making our decades feel like breaths–Heck, they felt like breaths spending them. A little huddle of boulders slumped around a pool of cold black water that in the summer just sat there smiling up at us and shouting “Jump!” Today I hear a different voice, just as lunatic. It says “Selfie!” Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Mom and I will need a photo to mark this discovery, to share it and to seal it for all time, yes? That’s what one does these days, is it not? I have a two-year-old in my story time who arranged her dolls and toys all in a row to take a cell phone picture of them, who asks her gran each time to snap a shot of her proudly holding her finished craft. An epistemological shift as big as the glaciers themselves: If it isn’t captured in film it hasn’t happened, right?

So, you get the picture now. Two old ladies out in the middle of woods at twilight, no one around for miles except maybe the bears just rousing from their late day naps to scrounge for dinner and yes, I am really going to lead my mother to the very edge of that rock precipice, over the exposed roots and slippery leaves covering uneven ground and yes, we really are going to turn our backs to that black pool below and the sheer drop. What is it you got, old woman? Coronary heart disease and arthritis and polymyalsia and what else? And here we are to seize the life from the marrow of those roots and make it. Yes, make it. She is ninety pounds, wet. And I am going to keep her dry, and upright, and (hardest of all) still. And we are going to do this cell phone thing, capturing both our laughing faces and the beautiful stream and wood behind us on this infernal electronic device. (Do I sound like her? The lines are blurring, I tell you what). Only we are laughing so hard and yelling and protesting–to whom–? The bears?? that I can barely get the dumb cell phone the way I need it, plus my hands are so cold and my eyesight so bad that this little New England Everest eludes me still. I am not very good at taking selfies. This may be the second or third one I’ve ever attempted. Mom told me once she fell backward into the lake the first one she took. But I am determined to keep her from falling, or from stumbling into me and both of us falling, only to land in the next installment of Drama in Real Life. Then I realize, homecoming weekend, mother-daughter sandwich that I am, there is an awful lot of drama in this one life. More hilarious is that mom, alternately steadying herself on my arm and swatting me away with a ski pole still attached to one arm, is trying to reach into her pocket and produce a lipstick–lipstick!!–for the occasion. Of course. Lipstick.

Smile, mama.

Smile for all you’re worth and say cheese.