The past six weeks I have been taking a writing workshop online which is led by a dear friend, Christin Taylor. I wanted to share a piece I wrote there and encourage any of you interested in writing to look into Christin’s Blank Page Workshops. Her tagline “Stop Staring. Start Writing.” gives you a glimpse into her heart to help you turn the blank page into something worth sharing. I can’t say enough great things about it.
Here is a piece I wrote which will make sense if you’ve read previous blogs from my summer adventures:
I am pondering a reality I don’t like. My one-person couch cushions me gracefully in its white marshmallowness – a comfort in the midst of this truth – summer is leaving, again.
These past three months were unique – I finished my first book, my husband, Nate, and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary, and I attended my ten-year high school reunion. As I reflect on all that happened, I’m not quite ready to descend into shorter days or pumpkin spice lattes.
“What day are you leaving again?” My boss, Matt, asked at my student life job at a local university.
“May 19th,” I said with an air of excitement and exhaustion as if the end of my annual ten-month contract could not come soon enough.
“And you’re coming back when?”
“July 19th. Eight weeks. Just like the last four years,” I repeated in the playful sarcastic tone we had become so accustomed to working together for that entire time.
“You’re sure you want to leave for eight weeks?” Matt bantered.
“You’re sure the university doesn’t want to pay me more?” We laughed, knowing that even money couldn’t entice me from the better payment of having two months off. I’d take the lower pay. “I’ll be happy to see you in July.”
May 19th came and I put my out-of-office email assistant on and I took off – literally. This summer found me on eight airplanes, visiting three states. Each trip was an altar of remembrance of sorts and carried experiences I had looked forward to for months, years even.
In May and early June, Nate and I visited Cape Cod, Mass. to celebrate our anniversary and my book. A land dedicated to cooking, writing, gardening and vacationing. It seemed to good to be true as we visited the lone winery on The Cape (as the locals call it) and made discoveries of bookstores that had seen more history than the books inside of them.
This place seemed to good to be true and in a lot of ways it was. We found ourselves in museums and on beaches surrounded by monuments to the pilgrims. We read countless plaques dedicated to these men who tromped on the sand in their medieval clothing, looking stiff and out of sorts next to their new neighbors – the native Americans. We were then met with a harsh truth. We went on to read of the tribes’ feeble attempts to protect their homeland with bows and arrows that did not measure up to gunpowder. We witnessed the cultural aftermath of disease that ultimately destroyed the native way of life and introduced colonialism.
“Don’t you wonder what this place should look like? I mean, I love it here, but it’s just weird that none of these people are really native,” I vented into the safe stillness of our rental car as the two of us drove away from another landmark.
I wanted to go back in time, not forward. But the trip forced us into another day, full of new discoveries and opportunities to reflect, not only on our marriage, but on history.
Time pressed on and brought us to the end of June and I boarded a plane without my love to a place my soul has found rest in the past – Ashland, Oregon. Up above the small tourist town lays a small community called Lincoln that is now home to a converted logging camp.
The summer brings contemplative prayer retreats to this weathered place where my weathered body can be at peace without city-life distractions. For four hours each day we maintain silence and learn different Christian meditation practices. Normally this is the slowest week of my year; however, this week seemed like an hourglass where I watched the sand disappear quicker than I wanted.
Finally, July brought the much-anticipated reunion. In one day we tried to mash in ten years of updates and I wondered as I drove away what the next ten would bring – knowing 38 would come quicker than 28.
July 19th was here before I could enjoy our garden that had flourished in my absence. My travels had taken me far and wide in thought, reflection, and geography, yet there was something I longed for in those moments. I wanted minutes to be hours and hours to be days. My sense of time seemed to wash over me so quickly like a wave crashing to shore after I had waited so long in anticipation for its arrival.
There wasn’t enough time to travel out to Martha’s Vineyard to talk to the only tribal members who remained in an intact native community. There wasn’t time to soak up all of what the Spirit was teaching me in Oregon. There wasn’t time to go deeper with former best friends as we all had to go back to our normal routines which no longer included one another. Not time to savor the garden I had so painstakingly rototilled and dumped mounds of coffee colored compost on to achieve that first tantalizing tomato – now we had pounds ripening faster than we knew what to do with.
So my soul feels restless and tired as I crave more warm summer nights with homemade bruschetta and stare into the eyes of my husband while the twinkle lights reflect his love back in mine. I don’t want to put the patio cushions away quite yet or pull the sweater box off the shelf.
I know that won’t happen for a few more months under the inferno that is the Californian September sun. But as the students return on Monday for a new year, I am wondering how I can hold on to summer now that Fall semester has officially begun?
