Fourth of July weekend, we rented a car and traveled to Gettysburg. Hearing my husband attempt an explanation of the Civil War to his two sons, the older four and a half, the younger nearly three, made me want to undress him. Not because he did it well (he didn’t) and not because they understood all that he told them (they didn’t) but mainly because he tried, grasping at phrasings, stuttering as he attempted to boil America’s bloodiest battle down to its preschool essence. “You know how you and Sam sometimes fight?” Tim resorted to saying. Teddy, his mouth discolored from a red, white, and blue Popsicle, nodded between licks. “Imagine you and all your friends fighting. Can you do that?” Tim must have known Teddy had no interest. But this did not stop him. And I didn’t want to stop him, because the minute he gave up his premature history lecture would be the minute we’d have to climb back in the rental car and drive to the Gettysburg mall parking lot and locate Booth 48, where my mother, Ariel, and her common-law husband, Hal, were displaying my mother’s artwork for sale.

My mother is an artist. Part of me would like to leave it at that. Leave you with your own idea of what an artist is. But to say she is an artist, while kind, is to mislead you. Greater specificity is required. My mother—the ex-hippie, herbalist, cigarette-smoking vegan—is a driftwood artist. Meaning: Three months each year, she combs the beaches of both coasts (especially the log-strewn great Northwest) where various shapes of certain saltwater-logged woods wash ashore. The first time she explained her process, I listened closely. But after realizing that a chasm existed between her description of “the work” and the reality of said work, I chose to forget what she tried to explain. Simply, and it’s all rather simple, this wood washes ashore, she collects it, she dries it out (the larger pieces take a few weeks), and she “listens” to the wood. Not literally. She looks at the wood and waits until the shape suggests itself to her. For instance, the most common of shapes to suggest itself is a coiled snake. Or the half-coiled snake. Or the slithering snake. Listening to the wood is basically a process of determining where to place/ glue the two plastic eyes, for the amazing thing about driftwood, and I use amazing in the most limited sense, is that without the eyes placed just so, the wood stays any old wood. You see, Katie . . . (My mother calls me Katie whenever she’s proud of herself and wants me to be proud of her, too.) You see, Katie, it’s the eyes that make all the difference.

But that’s already too much about her.

The truth was, after that unfortunate weekend in Gettysburg, our summer got increasingly more glorious. This was due, I believe, to the approaching first Tuesday in September when I would resume working full-time. We knew to appreciate those few hot months. Tim coined the perfect phrase for it: “Never-to-be-again time.”