This has not been a banner month at our house.

Work, for me, has been stressful. I have tackled a project that is more unwieldy than I assumed, it keeps sliding through my grasp and the chinks in my expertise. Details accumulate like mushrooms, popping up in the vast expanse of what I don’t know and shovel with optimism. I have been traveling incessantly, eating too much and losing the thread of every book I begin to read. There is another long trip looming and I have been cramming my domestic presence in every situation, desperately hoping that intensified quantity must mean quality.

My teenager is not buying my concentrated efforts. He has troubles of his own: high school, theater, friends, life as a newborn only-child since his brother left for college. Adolescence drapes over him with magisterial weight. He knows how the world should be and what edicts will keep it spinning in his direction.

There has been tension. There have been words. We have not had a clear change management strategy.

My response has been to revive the dormant drama of my own teenage angst, not in solidarity, but in combat. Objectivity, that key distinction between adult from child, shifts in and out of focus. I have thought: I just want this transitional stage to be over, for us to get back to normal, whatever that normal may turn out to be. I want it to be yesterday or tomorrow – today stinks.

A few days ago my son suggested that I take the afternoon off work and take him to the Botanical Gardens. He was inspired by a Project Runway challenge and wanted to take some pictures. I assessed my unfinished agendas, the stacks of material to memorize, the incredulous face on my coworker who has a clue just how behind I might be and said, “OK.”

At the Gardens, we parted ways for a bit, he wanted some time alone. When he came back and showed me his photos, I was stunned. Frame by frame I realized what had gone missing from my perspective. My son had captured mid-autumn in Chicago, colors bright and fading, harvest and evergreen, sensual and abstract. He took hundreds of shots, each picture reflecting a present tense that dies and lives and transforms all at the same time. Through his lens I remembered a quote I had once read:

“You and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing . . . you and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.”

e.e. cummings

In the now of his pictures, we just sat. The two of us, between summer and winter, adult and child, past and future.