the school bus didn’t stop

This morning when I went outside to feed the Steller’s jays who were waiting for their sunflower seeds, I heard the school bus on the highway below our house. It hasn’t stopped at our driveway for 23 years but I still hear it. I hear it slow down for the turn in the road and the part of me that remembers every morning of those years, making breakfasts, making sure lunches were stuffed into backpack, that forms were filled out, yes, that part: well, she still leans on the door to listen as the bus stops at the bottom of the driveway to pick up her children. It hasn’t stopped for 23 years. In other provinces my grandchildren have been back at school for a week or two now. Photographs arrived of them on their porches or standing with their bikes in front of their houses. New clothes. Smiles.

In grade one I walked to school along May Street to Moss Street, turning the corner, sometimes meeting a classmate. I had a plaid schoolbag. Saddle shoes. I figured out I could also take a different route, up over Moss Rocks and down a little street to Fairfield Road, right across from the Sir James Douglas Elementary School Annex where my grade one classroom was, the one where I day-dreamed by the window during the reading lesson because I’d already been reading for two years. I hated the readers we used. Fun With Dick and Jane, and others like it. Everything happened in one or two syllables. At home I was entranced by books about the Bob Whites of the Glen and Crabapple Farm and Blue Willow and Nancy Drew mysteries.

While I was swimming, I was watching the sun appear and disappear behind the little islands. One of my grandsons swam to them this summer with his dad. While they were with us in August, the children came down to the lake each morning, though mostly they waited until the afternoon to swim. They threw sticks for the caretaker’s dog when she came to pick up garbage and clean the bathroom. They brought books and sat with their granddad after he’d finished his swim (usually before me). They picked salal berries to bring back for pancakes. I don’t how many mornings we had salal pancakes when their parents were growing up but it seems like a hundred. Or more. The scent of the oil heating, the batter bubbling on the old iron griddle that left its brand on the bottom of some of the pancakes.

When I listened for the school bus, then, and this morning, I was listening to the passage of time, wasn’t I? The bus taking my children away from me, into the world, though for some years it brought them back again. Until it didn’t.

We grow old but we are always those others, the children walking to school across Moss Rocks, day-dreaming by a window, the young woman waiting for the school bus to make its way around the corner of the highway leading up from the lake and later in the day, pausing on the route to Egmont to let the children off to run up the driveway, home. Their dog was waiting at the top of the driveway, listening, as I listened.

Is it the light? Is it the smell of lake in my hair as I write this? Hearing a dog bark far away and thinking, Oh, it’s Lily, she’s still alive. I think of the beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”, by E.B. White in which these thoughts are also his. Mine. Ours.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design,