It’s been a pretty whirlwind summer, jumping from England into Tanglewood to the normal August madness that is the Black Hat concert, to a week with my parents. And now school has started once again. It’s enough to make one really feel the passing of time.
The Boy has found his way a little into Harry Potter, speaking of the passing of time, and we’ve watched up through The Prisoner of Azkaban, which remains my favorite of the movies, some fourteen years after I first wrote about it. The timing of the arrival of a new wave of HP Lego is welcome; he got the Whomping Willow for his birthday and was eager to build Mr. Weasley’s Ford Anglia and the Willow. The bricks for the set’s section of Hogwarts have stayed in their box.
But the biggest way the passing of time made itself known was my visit to my Grandmother’s house. “Mama Linda,” as my uncle Forrest has always called her and which makes it easy for us to tell the kids which “grandma” we’re talking about, made her home with Papa Olin in a small house that my great-grandfather Zeb Jarrett built, and my grandfather added onto. Up until my grandmother’s death while I was in grad school, we still felt her animating presence throughout the house. Now, it seems more like a museum. Rearranged by my aunt, who modernized it a little, removing most of a wall between the kitchen and the tiny dining room and made it into something that could be rented, it sat empty until my aunt’s death. Now my cousins have redecorated it a bit, taking down some of my aunt’s generic mountain pictures and cleaning it with my sister’s considerable help. But it still sits empty and waiting.