Mid August has found me in the gardens pulling the dried, brown leaves off the tall phlox whose blooms are still scented with summer. Beside us, the butterfly bush boasts a brilliant fuchsia, sending out its heady pheromones, urging pollinators to drink their fill as though eternal youth is a promise.

The endless pursuit of bittersweet is threatening the borders again, so I pull their greedy orange roots and toss them onto the black pavement. Bittersweet. I can think of no better word to describe this season of life. Earlier in the day, when the house was humming with waking life, I stilled the words in my husband’s mouth before they could find air. Placing a breakfast bagel in front of our son’s chair, I told him, “I only have a few more opportunities to do this.”

I can feel the ocean in my eyes. Does the tug of the mother-womb ever leave us? I want to hold onto time as much as I want to let it go. There is an old farm in Maine that whispers a love song to my heart, which constricts with impending loss. How many mothers rejoice and weep in the same breath as the longing for the redefinition of self competes with fierce pull to hold onto the children walking through the threshold of adulthood?

I need to get used to the quiet, remembering that in the space of silence the soul can sing loud and strong. There is a season for everything, and each one holds an open and a closing. The neighbor’s children remind me of days filled with pool floats and small feet racing over wet concrete, and I realize there is a different sound I seek. Already I can hear next summer’s bees and the full-throated call the bullfrogs down by a pond that exists somewhere that is not here.