There’s a book I reread at the beginning of each summer, as faithfully as others might shop for a new swimsuit. Ladder of Years is Anne Tyler’s novel about Delia Grinstead, a middle-aged Baltimore wife and mother who walks away from her family one day during a beach vacation and starts over in a new town.
Nothing about Delia’s life up to then offers any hint – to her family, to the reader, to herself – that she’s capable of such bold and decisive action. She’s lived in the same house her entire life. Her mother died when she was too young for Delia to remember her, but as one of her older sisters ruefully observes, "You never seemed to notice" - for Delia, like King Lear’s Cordelia, was her father’s favorite. She married the young doctor her father hired to assist him in his family practice, and she’s raised three children. She has settled comfortably into a life that feels accidental, in which no one – let alone herself - takes her very seriously.
We meet Delia at age 40, not long after her father’s death and her older husband’s mild heart attack, and just as her youngest child is nearing graduation from high school. A brief encounter with an attractive stranger leads to a light dalliance, but Delia never seriously considers leaving her family – at least, not until an argument with her husband sends her marching down the beach and toward a new life.
I suppose every woman of a certain age – and perhaps every man, too – fantasizes about walking away and starting over. It’s tempting to imagine we can reset our lives just by changing where we live. It’s part of the appeal of a summer vacation, leaving everything familiar for someplace cooler, more exotic. Like Delia, by going where no one knows us we think we can escape who we are, at least temporarily. So for a while this summer, many of us will vacate our homes, our personalities, and our duties and routines. But like a family member who knew us when and smiles knowingly at our attempts to untangle ourselves from our roots, our homes sit patiently empty, waiting for our inevitable return.
Vacations are simultaneously relaxing and energizing precisely because they give us an opportunity to play at being adrift in the world, without history or responsibilities.The current economic climate puts traditional vacations out of reach for many of us; but there are many ways of "vacating" your life, ranging from harmless pastimes like daydreaming, to more drastic and even destructive measures. "Who would I be," we might muse from a seaside hammock, or woolgathering over the day's work, "If I didn’t know who I am?"
Maybe this is why summer romances cast such a long shadow in our memories. They're relationships that are usually formed outside the context of our regular lives, with people who don’t know what we’re supposed to be—relationships founded not on convenience or familiarity, but on something fundamental and unchanging at our core. Because they validate a part of us that tends to get lost in the shuffle of daily life, such relationships resonate purely and profoundly. It’s terribly sad when we leave them behind at the end of summer and return to "real life."
And yet the New Moon in the home-loving sign of Cancer reminds us how reassuring it can be to return home. What a relief, to sink back into your own bed and familiar routines. How delicious, to return to the life that while it may not always reflect your essence, is something arguably more interesting, a kind of collaboration between you and the people you’ve invited into it, tempered by the hundred different compromises and superficial moments that make up an average day.
I think I love Delia’s story not because I fantasize about leaving home, because rarely has a woman been more tethered to her home than I. But I love the idea of reinvention, of starting fresh someplace where no one knows me. Like Delia, who relishes her anonymity and terse interactions with the citizens of her new town, I fantasize that a new place would let me be the person I’d like to be, instead of a creature of habit and other people’s expectations. And in fact, Delia’s new town does teach her that she is much more practical and serious than Delia Grinstead of Baltimore, with her childish pastel outfits and desperate desire to please.
The July 11 Cancer New Moon is a Solar Eclipse, a response to the call of the unsettling June 26 lunar eclipse in Capricorn. For many, the shock of losing jobs and homes and retirement savings has left us feeling as adrift as a crab that’s lost its shell. But others, like Delia, have lives that look relatively placid on the outside, while inside them there is an almost wild sense of having outgrown that shell. Eclipses mark lines in the sand, lines that indicate where one chapter of your life ends and another begins. Sometimes, leaving behind what’s safe and familiar is the only way we’ll learn who we are… but it makes us afraid that we’ll never find our way back home.
But for good or for ill, life doesn’t usually work that way. Everyone moves on, but hardly anyone makes a clean getaway. We leave too many guideposts to help us work our way back to where we started…. memories of loved ones, old shoes and credit card receipts, fading photographs of beach vacations, crumpled to-do lists, yellowing letters from summer lovers. We may take the occasional vacation from our lives, to give ourselves a chance for rest, recreation, and reinvention. But like the tide, or like a child playing outside in the hot summer twilight, we nearly always return home in the end.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
