Endings and Beginnings

“Oh, better than the minting of a gold-crowned king

Is the safe-kept memory of a lovely thing.”

                          —Sara Teasdale

Spring is here. One season has ended and a new one is underway. I guess before there can be any kind of a new beginning, something that goes before has to end. It’s these endings and beginnings that mark the passage of time. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic this morning as I see my grandchildren end their school year. They are not nearly as wistful about it as I am. They are eager and happy, looking forward always to something new and exciting. Which is good. That’s the way it should be. But we grandparents, well, sometimes we suffer a few pangs as we watch.

When my son and now my grandchildren were babies, just learning to walk, they fell sometimes. They took many a hard bump. But they always got up and tried again. And walking became so much fun, giving them all kinds of new freedom, that they soon forgot about the bumps.

I have handprints of my grandchildren as most of us parents and grandparents have. They hang on my refrigerator on paper plates that were Mother’s Day gifts or on the pages of a journal that I keep for them. Tiny prints of baby hands, kindergarten hands, first and second graders. And I am amazed at how quickly they grew. Wasn’t it just yesterday that they learned to grasp a crayon or toss a ball?

The school year ends; the teachers present programs and I watch my grandchildren sing, recite, play the piano, all those things that show how much they’ve learned. I am glad and happy for my little ones who have accomplished an awfully lot in what, to me, seems like a mighty short amount of time. But I remember the warm, cuddly babies that I rocked to sleep and wonder where in the world did the years go?

Of course, I won’t tell them that I feel a bit sad about a school year ending. They are happy and eager and certainly would not want their Mem to be anything but happy and eager with them. And I am. I look forward to seeing them take new paths and learn lots of exciting things because, how can a person go forward if she’s always looking back. Right? I found a brief verse that sort of takes care of the whole thing. I don’t know who wrote it:

“Time flies, Suns rise and shadows fall;

Let time go by, Love is forever over all.”