Thoughts: Summer 2016

Summer is reaching its height here, the early days of August being the pinnacle of summer, the cream of the crop. All of August, is, in fact, glorious in Seattle. It's the best that summer has to offer. I've never been very fond of July.

And so while summer finally spreads out over us, embracing us in hot days and warm, companionable nights, I start thinking about the fall, and what I need to gather up and pack into my little car to move back to Idaho in a few weeks. It seems a little disloyal, to start thinking of leaving just as the season shows its glory. It's the way life's come to me, and there's really no lack of loyalty to the pacific northwest, and summer will get on just as it would whether or not I was here.

As my time gets short, I stand in the backyard under the morning sun, warm enough to make you hot if you stand in it for too long, picking a bowl full of blackberries from the wild bushes that lay hold to our lower field. My feet dangle off the dock as I sit with my back to the setting sun, a sandwich filled with spinach and tomatoes and bacon in my hand and a dear friend at my side. I walk home along quiet country roads across my dearly beloved island, alone in the buzz of an late summer afternoon.

I do a lot of things in the sun these days, if I can help it. I think it would be hard to not love the sun, especially if, like me, you grew up in a city known for its cloudy skies. Boise has taught me to love the sun even more. To enjoy the days on days of blue skies and bright light and warmth on my skin all year long.

My sights are set on the home I have in the tree lined streets and lazy river and dry hills in Idaho. It's the heart split of being grateful for the time spent at home, with the people who've known me all of my life, and also anticipating the return among the people I've made my own life among.

In many ways this summer was not what I had imagined or maybe hoped it to be. In others, it was exactly what I expected. It is the summer I will remember as the summer I bought my first car, at 19. The summer Jill and Claudia and I met at a coffee shop every week to study the book of Philippians. The summer of spontaneous trips to the Oregon Coast and to Leavenworth.

Life is unpredictable, and I struggle with trying to predict the unpredictably. I try to decide what is going to happen saying, this will be the season. Usually it isn't, and then I have to pick myself up and go at it again, a little more worn and a little bit wiser at what the world holds and of the depth of God's love for me. There is much to be thankful for in this summer (and a few more things I'm heartily looking forward to), and I wouldn't change the way it's worked out. Things happen for a reason. God has a plan. The end of the summer beckons the start of the school year, though, and it floods my heart with anticipatory hope for the months to come.