Summer Heat

I know..................it has been exactly one month and 17 days since I last posted.

One month and 17 days of mostly hot, HOT days.

I am tired, worn out really, and am looking forward to enjoying summer vacation. Alas, I realize it is half over and I have not even started yet. Will this be the summer I remember years from now as "THE" summer? It's funny how we never know while we are in it, while we are living it, that these may be the days we will remember in years to come, as the "good old days", or the "worst days of my life".

I want to memorize every sound I hear, every sight I see. I want to make a clay impression of my life, in my mind, so that years from now, I will remember everything that mattered, but instead, I think........................I will remember the heat. I will remember a hot wind blowing across a parched brown lawn, cracks enlarging in the dry brown dirt in my garden.

I will remember "the cusser", a young (very young) JD (juvenile delinquent) running the streets of my town, with no respect or regard for himself, let alone anyone else. I will remember his faceless obscenities, spoken to the night, his trying to make sense of the injustice of HIS life, and me trying to make sense of how one child can already be so jaded, so ugly minded that already he has lost the ability to feel anything but meanness and hatred and it so fills his mind and his heart and his spirit that he feels he must defile everyone within hearing distance by swearing and cursing and tainting the night air.

I will remember the smells of this town, especially as they linger in the hot afternoon sun, and I will remember how the smell assaulted more than our nostrils. I will remember how they tore apart the safety and loving kindness in our community, how they made us feel afraid in our own town, afraid to even be out with one another, distrustful and violated. I will remember the sadness when I realized how much life can be disrupted by strangers, and their own brand of insanity. When I remember this summer, I will remember it for it's inequity, it's violation, the taking away of something that should be intrinsically ours................our peace of mind.

I will remember the fear and desperation in my heart, I am sure, as I struggled to leave the last remaining vestiges of innocence and child-like trust on the cutting room floor. "I am afraid", I thought. Afraid of my Daddy getting sick and not recovering, afraid of him not loving me anymore, afraid of him not knowing how much I love him.

I am afraid of working so much that I feel as thin spirited as onion paper, paper that will dissolve and disintegrate when my many tears fall upon it. I am afraid of not working enough to support my family and myself and having to count change to buy milk and bread for the young. I am afraid of working my life away at a job I don't love, only to discover that when I retire, I have no time left. Mostly I am afraid of the lack of hope that permeates the very air I breathe, no hope for a brighter future for me and my family....only a certainty that I can no longer follow my magical thinking to it's logical conclusion, a dream I built on the promises of a different time.

Will I remember this as the summer that I learned the truth? The summer when I gave over my want for something more on this earth to the certain knowledge that I will never attain it? Will this be the summer that I started looking more forward to life everlasting with it's heavenly possibilities than to life among the living here on earth? Maybe, this, then, is when we finally grow up, when we reach that threshold and step over it into real adulthood.

Or,......................is this the summer that begins a new life? Will I look back and remember these hot and dusty days as the dark before the storm? Will there be a silver lining? Is there the promise of peace and prosperity on the other side? We never know...........................and in the not knowing, we continue to salvage and plunder all of the good we can glean from the here and now.

And like those dried out and tired flowers adorning my garden, dusty and brown from heat and drought, we go to seed. We release our seeds of hope into the fertile ground we have farrowed,....cultivated during the heat of summer, and they drop and take root in the soil that is our faith, and eventually the rains will come..........They will grow and thrive.

And when that time comes, some distant day away, will I remember this summer as the "good old days", or some of the "worst days of my life"? Will I remember the way the tomatoes grew like beanstalks and the morning glories thrived? Will I remember the surprise I felt at dancing with my nephew as though I were a valued and treasured family member? Will I remember the pride and joy and love and hope that I took in my children and my grandchildren? I hope so.

I want to keep on keeping on..................for them,......so that they will know the value of walking on in faith, the glory of continuing to try and rising above all that pulls you down. I want this to be the summer that THEY remember....the summer when Mom stood strong and overcame.

And as for me,......summer is only half over. I think I'll try a little more.....laugh a little more, pray a little more and try, REALLY hard to remember not to take myself so seriously.