The Song of Purple Summer

Driving into the rising sun as it lifts the mist from the fields, I am surrounded by an invisible chorus singing “The Song of Purple Summer” from the musical Spring Awakening. It is becoming a spectacularly green morning, an appropriate response to the song’s promise that “the earth will wave with corn.”

I am driving back to Ohio from Iowa, having delivered Eleanor and a pretty good amount of her stuff to college for her second year. I am driving farther than I’ve ever driven alone before, and having gotten tired of my audiobook–Ray Bradbury short stories—I am playing old music CDs, ones that Eleanor made for me at various times, including Spring Awakening, which has gotten to this part as I round Fort Wayne:

A summer’s day
a mother sings
a song of purple summer
through the heart of everything
and heaven waits
so close it seems
to show her child the wonders
of a world beyond her dreams

Some of the roadside weeds appear to have a purple underside; none of them are brown or dusty yet. The tall grass has gone to seed. Vines drape themselves over the fences. I drive through miles of construction barrels, with multiple signs warning of the draconian consequences should I accidentally hit a worker, but everyone on the road with me is speeding through because there are no workers out yet this morning. The fields stretch away from the road on both sides, revealed at an absolute peak of greenness as the sun finally rises above windshield level. I think of Keats as I continue to drive through the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

I think of Eleanor, left at her college, and not without echoes of last year’s sadness and apprehension. I think about Walker, who needs to be taken to visit colleges this fall as he decides where he will be heading next year at this time. I think that, rather than feeling like an empty nest, home feels more stretched than it ever has before. There will be many more dark highways leading into the dawn.

“Where are the songs of spring?” They have been playing, and this last song is the culmination. I think I have succeeded in showing the children a few of the wonders of a world beyond my dreams, and now I have to try to expand the contours of my own dreams so I can continue with them a little ways, to give them that push at the end of the driveway, sending them wobbling out on their own into the road that goes ever on and on.