Children have this quality, less evident to their parents than to those who don’t see them as often, of growing at breakneck speed, eliciting a slew of predictable, yet nonetheless charming, comments (“he looks like a totally different person!” or the rhetorical, “where has the time gone?”).

As a younger mom, I didn’t connect with this sentiment as readily as I do these days. My children were adorable, yes, but needy, and exhausting. Comments about their growth felt misplaced. “Bigger,” I’d think? “They still seem very little.” They still, I’d say to myself, cannot go to the bathroom on their own. 

Now, with our two teenagers and their nearly ten-year-old little sister, rapidly gaining on them – now I see it. The ability to witness time’s exponential shifts – its mind-bending ways – has landed like a gift, earned, perhaps, by those early, endless, days. 

Finally, I get that it’s all a phase, that the toys won’t (and didn’t) fill the house forever. Finally, I’m not in a rush to move on. I watch my 15-year-old daughter, poised, reading quietly on a beach towel, and think, “Wait, where did it go, though? The time?”

We’ve just returned to Connecticut from our too-many-years-going-to-count, multi-week stint on Southport. I thought about this a lot during our time there. Because if there’s one thing that crystalizes the distance between the dizzying moments that make up our lives – the moments that make up a childhood – it’s a familiar spot, well-loved, and visited regularly. 

It’s nearly impossible to see these changes in the day to day of “what are we going to have for dinner?” and getting to piano lessons, in the same way that you can’t sit there and watch a plant grow. But Maine, for me, is the well-worn backdrop that brings these observations into sharp focus, as my children jump from rock to rock along the shore, or peer at the lobsters at Robinson’s, in the same way as when they were little, just the same – and yet – wasn’t this gangling 13-year-old, not so long ago, much shorter than me?  

Pulling up to my mother’s house, where we disembark for a few weeks from late July through mid-August, seems to put the calendar year on hold as my husband, my children, and I greet summer friends and annual visitors; as we all catch up about the year gone by. We often move in multi-generational packs: my mom and her friends, their kids who are my friends, and their kids’, who are friends with my children.

“Look how big they’ve gotten, look at them,” the grandparents say, all caught up in nostalgia and disbelief. There it is, though, irrefutably illuminated by these yearly midsummer happenings: everyone once again wrapped in striped towels by the pool, ravenously assessing this year’s book and toy displays at Sherman’s, and leaping, manic, off the dock. 

Regular life, it doesn’t always let me see my children clearly enough, except in those notable, somewhat rare, instances (that last walk home from fourth grade, or the middle school band concert -- you know the ones). Perhaps that’s a good thing, because regular life necessitates regular action, like getting to school on time, best not interrupted by extended philosophical pondering. 

But against the backdrop of this mid-coast landscape – one I’ve known since I, too, was a child - my kids are, unquestionably, different, juxtaposed against a kaleidoscope of memories. Doing the same things in the same places as all those years prior. And yet… 

There’s my son on the rocks building structures out of driftwood, and my youngest daughter eating melting peppermint ice cream by the footbridge. There’s my oldest sitting serenely at my mom’s wooden dining room table, where one summer as a three-year-old, she sang, “Puff the Magic Dragon” with the shameless confidence bestowed by toddlerhood alone. Then, and now, and then again. 

On our annual trips to Southport, time does that trick – back bending, ricocheting – then staying still. Allowing me to see my children from the vantage point of an outsider on these unhurried Maine days, and the hours – so prolonged they almost seem stolen – to wonder at it all.