My Little Flock Flies in Formation
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Photo by Natalie Parham on Unsplash
It was a strange winter break in the Knott household for several reasons I can’t really get into on the internet. There was the pandemic, of course, that limited our normal holiday festivities, but more unexpected events made the two weeks off school even more unusual.
I’m not going to lie. The whole Christmas to New Year and beyond period feels like a blur. I’m not sure what, if anything, happened on any single day during that time. I typically feel sad about the holidays ending — not so much because I like them but because it’s another reminder of the passage of time — yet I couldn’t even muster a very strong post-holiday depression this year. Not having the opportunity to slow down and slip into my sadness sweater was honestly a bit of a bummer.
Every day seemed to bleed into the next as I suppose it has for much of the last nine or ten months. There was childcare, dishes, fetching snacks, preparing meals, a broken dryer, long and protracted bedtimes, and a little bit of sleep. Then we pressed repeat for about seventeen or seventeen hundred days.
A pandemic continues to rage, but it has become somewhat easier to forget about it. We are now used to not going anywhere and my wife, a nurse, received the vaccine a week before Christmas, which brought us at least a small dose of relief. I feel lucky that this act of forgetting and turning inward has allowed us to block out a bit of the darkness as we continue to pull together more tightly.
A few days after school started back, such as it is with everyone still at home, the kids were riding their bikes outside on our cul-de-sac in the late afternoon. It was a crisp day with bright blue skies. As I watched from the sidewalk, brown leaves driven by a cool winter breeze rained down from the oak trees and scuttled across the street.
I’m happy to report my children have taken to spending significantly more time outside riding the new scooters they got for Christmas and their bikes. I don’t know if it’s societal conditioning or something purer, but I do feel better when my kids are outside more. And no, it’s not because it gives more time alone in the house, because I’m usually outside keeping them company.
On this day, the kids decided to ride their bikes in formation up and down our street, like a small flock of birds. After they argued about who should take the lead, they formed up into a classic arrow formation and set off. They were pretending to be birds, but they also looked like a cute and relatively non-threatening motorcycle gang. None of them had leather jackets, but at least one was barefoot, so I certainly would’ve advised against messing with them.
All three little birds/motorcycle gangsters zoomed up and down the street in ragged formation for several minutes. Or maybe it was hours? Probably not hours because they can’t stick to any non-screen activity for that long, but like I said, time is kind of an unruly schmear right now.
They laughed, they argued about who was messing everything up, they did everything that siblings do. As I watched almost unnoticed and momentarily forgotten from my perch on my bike on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house, I couldn’t help think about how grown they looked. The youngest is four, but she already rides a bike like a pro, so she seems like a big kid. And even at six and nine, the boys look and act older and more mature every day.
As they soared up and down the street I thought about their futures. I hope no matter what the coming years look like — and there is certainly reason to believe those years could be quite challenging — they’ll always be able to count on each other. That they will always be a little flock. Stronger and more vociferously argumentative together.
The craziness of the last few weeks, and really, the last ten months has made me realize just how important family is. It’s something you feel like you know, but when times get difficult, you truly understand just how important it is to be able to count on the people you love most.
I think we’ve all been learning that over and over again for the last year. I know I certainly have. With the pandemics and elections and attempted coups and everything else, I don’t know where’d I’d be without them. For now, my little flock flies together. And I hope they will for many years to come.
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