First Year Out

"August arrives, hot and breathless and full of all the things you held on to too tightly. and all the places that defined summer start to melt together, the sand that got stuck in your hair, and the bug bites you picked at too much, and the taste of every sunset that slipped through the open car window. somehow each summer is its own lifetime, we love and eat; and the sun will spin around us without fail." 

I have no idea who wrote that quote. I've searched, and I just keep coming up with anonymous. So, dear anonymous (who, according to Virginia Woolf, was a woman) thanks for that. 

Each summer has always felt like it's own lifetime. I have always defined my life in summers - "what year was that? Oh that was the summer I went to nerd camp/theater camp/New York social justice program/Oxford film program/DC internship/was a camp counselor/studied abroad".  During high school, anything exciting that ever happened to me happened in summer, usually at one of the myriad of programs I went to. Summer meant travel and learning and adventure and a summer crush. The end of summer left me nostalgic and a little bit heartbroken for the new friends I left behind.  In college, summer was a welcome respite, but I wasn't quite so sad when it ended - leaving behind huts in the woods for my air-conditioned university apartment wasn't the most difficult transition after months of bug bites, porta-potties and screaming children.  

August now doesn't mark just the end of summer, it marks the end of the craziest year of my life.  I spent this year in the rolling hills of the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, in the heat of Texas and sleeping it all off in my home state of Georgia. In one year I have been to five different countries (six, if you count Texas...). I have ridden buses and boats and airplanes and marshutkas and carritos and donkey carts.  I have jumped into cold mountain pools and been carried across flooded mountain roads. I have fallen in and out of love. I have slept in terrible hostel beds and taken bucket showers and used outhouses and made friends with lizards and spiders and Georgian grandmothers who hit me with their canes. I have sang '90s karaoke at a bar filled with smoke and cowboy hats and Texas two-stepping.  I have walked through blizzards, burned myself on motorcycles, and prayed in tiny mountain chapels, large city mosques, and dangerously foggy roads. I have felt rich and luxurious as I ate delicious meals in Greece, and hungry and poor as I found yet another can of beans full of maggots in the Dominican. 

I have been lazy and bitter and discouraged and scared. At times I have not acted, not connected, not reached out.  I've been humbled and I've been humiliated. I've been blissfully happy. I have learned the art of silence. I have relearned the art of dancing with new friends. I have counted people as friends, real friends, when all we could use was my few words of Georgian or Haitian Creole, dancing feet and smiles.  I have been very sick and maybe near death. I have had family members pass away. I have marveled in the rain and in the sunset and at the ocean and the mountains and at the grape harvest and at my students all full of the glory and wonder of the Creator.  And I have wondered, while holding a skinny, bruised child, at the plans of the Creator.  

I have been humbled by the kindness of strangers and felt unworthy and it was true and right to know I was unworthy and to accept the kindness anyway. I have been very angry. And it was sometimes pride and cultural differences, and it was sometimes valid, raw anger.

I have had more awkward moments then should be allowed in anyone's lifetime. 

This was my first year out - outside of an institution, outside of the protection of family or school system or university. And what a year it was. 

There is an image in my mind, more like a five second movie clip, of a little boy in the Dominican, my neighbor, four years old, wearing nothing but dirty yellow undies, running down the street with his arms spread like wings in the sunshine, laughing his head off.  And for some reason when I try to package my past year this clip always comes to mind.

 I have not done anything terribly different (a lot of new graduates teach abroad) and I have not done anything terribly conventional. But somehow I know, after all the great times and the hard times and the awkward times, that I did what I was meant to do. There were things I needed to learn and to see and to live. 

And so August arrives. And so August goes, and in My Personal Calender it is the start of another year. 

Summertime

I write this from the back deck of my parent’s house, watching humming birds, still in my swimsuit, glorying in the green, cool morning, hot afternoon, last days of summer.

I always wondered about the people who were so glad to see summer go. I finally understood it after spending this summer working in DC. Especially when you don’t have a car, the heat and sun is simply another barrier in getting to work without looking like a sweaty rag. Everything smells more intense, the sun baking the very gum on the sidewalks. Sure, there are festivals and fireworks and out door concerts but even those are only enjoyable when blessed cool (hopefully) comes with evening.

But that’s the city.

Summer in the country, or even in the suburbs, is a thing of magic, especially when you are a kid. I grew up in what I have termed the “woodburbs” at the edge of metro Atlanta. When summer came, the relatively tame woods surrounding our neighborhood erupted into green. They became a jungle, a place of mystery with deep shadows to explore. The creek was our main playground, and there was a great swimming hole big enough to jump in, swinging by the rope some intrepid adventurer had tied up. We would build dams and climb over rocks and pick blackberries, trying to avoid spider webs and thorns. 

Every year we would stay a week in the mountains, visiting places like Slippery Rock and the Secret Spot, which were just as cool as they sounded (one a naturally made water slide, the other a picture perfect waterfall and swimming hole).

Then we would head to the lowlands, South Carolina, swamp country, where my Grandpa lives. There were fish to catch, and boats to paddle around in and blueberries to pick, and of course, the alligator we never saw but which made its presence felt in stories and jokes, enough to keep us from wading too far into the lake.

I feel so sad for the kids who never had a summer in the great outdoors. Not that the city has nothing to offer, but rambling through the woods teaches you how to amuse yourself, how to appreciate the natural world, and how to tell poison ivy from regular ivy. How do we expect people to care about the environment if they have never experienced it?  (There are cool organizations like the Fresh Air Fund, where I’ve worked, that try to give kids adventures like that!)

Even now, mostly grown up, nothing excites me more than a summer’s day spent outside. I don’t wander in the woods as much as I once did, but every year the first sound of the cicadas, ushering summer in, thrills me to my toes. We hike and canoe and play tennis and swim, especially swim.

 I love to swim, anywhere, ocean, lake, pool. When else can you feel this? Walk around soaked to the skin, dripping glistening water and not caring. You’re barefoot, wet, nearly naked, no make-up, your hair styled by the water, skin pebbled by sand and bug bites and striped, like some domesticated jungle creature, with tan lines and sunburn.  This is my element, the time and place in which I thrive. Winter will find me pale and lazy, a blanket-wrapped bump on a log, but in summer, I’m frolicking freely, too happy to even be terribly angry at all the mosquitoes.

I’m sure summer is lovely in its own way every where, but I like to think that the Southern summer, set to the soundtrack of cicada’s, so hot that standing barefoot on asphalt becomes a game of strength (one I used to play as a kid), is the best kind of summer. If the sun and humidity doesn’t kill you, it’s because you learned to embrace it. You learned to live in the water more than on dry land, to cook up delicious Southern food and catch the first cool breeze around sunset, maybe in the rolling hills of Appalachia, or in a canoe on the Chattahoochee river. 

Summer is an invitation to adventure.

Listen to Old Crow Medicine Show's song Wagon Wheel 

to hear what summer in the South sounds like to me. 

View from my deck

I still love the woods enough to stand inside trees 

We have a garden and usually a few chickens

Amicalola Falls in North Georgia

Foothills of the Appalachians 

My Grandpa's "upper" pond