like a clock during a thunderstorm

The thunder shook the windows and for the first time in more than five weeks, I was homesick.

My grandmother wore a path in the carpet as she paced up and down the hallway muttering about the flowers and the patio furniture and the storm siren and her car windows and the radio station while I layed in bed with the curtains thrown back and the blinds pulled up, watching the storm. It would only be a few minutes before she’d drag me out of bed and into the neighbor’s storm cellar.  She is afraid of thunderstorms.

But as lightning lit up the night sky and rain clicked against the windows, I felt myself calmly looking for sleep.

When I was little, my mother used to scoop up my little brother and me and lay on the couch with us by the windows in the living room to watch storms. We’d gasp at the lightning bolts and squeal with excitement when thunder boomed. There on the couch, there wasn’t anything we could possibly be afraid of.

More than a decade older, I scurried down the steps of the top level of a parking garage soaked in heavy rain drops and I stood with Elliott and watched a thunderstorm blow through campus from under the overhang. Out of the rain but close enough to feel the threatening winds, I still gasped in excitement as lightning jumped down from the clouds.

Last night as I gathered up the flashlights and lawn chairs and umbrellas and scurried across the yard after my grandmother who was already yanking up the doors to the storm cellar, I felt a pang of homesickness. I guess I was homesick for the calm excitement that used to arrive with storms.

Here, I just found panic.

i remember summers like this

I am sitting, legs sprawled across the front porch, fanning my face with my newspaper against early summer’s stifling heat.

My grandmother is making sun tea. She fills a jar with cool water, sprinkles in the tea leaves, sealing it shut and setting it on the table in the sun.

“There isn’t a breeze that blows through Kentucky on days like this,” she says, wiping the back of her forehead with her hand.

Her neighbor’s grandson is tilling up an area in the front yard for her summer flower garden and we watch as he works, the hum of the tiller drowning out the sound of tractors moving across the farm behind her house. Across the street, Mrs. Francis picks blackberries off the vine that grows on the fence around her yard. She’s making a blackberry pie that she’ll bring over after dinner tonight.

My grandmother spritzes a bouquet of flowers with a spray bottle that we’ll take and place on my grandfather’s grave this afternoon along with an American flag in honor of Memorial Day. Watching her arrange the flowers I can see my grandfather sitting in the chair next to her as he always used to do – smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper or slapping the mosquitoes that land on his arm.

I slap a mosquito that lands on my own arm and itch the place where it landed thinking about my grandfather. My tshirt is clinging to my body in the thick heat and I wonder what he’d be doing if he was still around. I wonder how living here for the summer would be different if it was the three of us.

My grandmother sits down beside me, talking to me about people I don’t know and telling me stories from her childhood that this day has conjured up and I nod and laugh on cue. Finally silence falls between us and we sit there listening to the tiller, watching Mrs. Francis and thinking about things that seem lifetimes away.

“We’ll go to the baseball game after while,” my grandmother says, snapping me back to the front porch. “It’ll raise up our moods. Ball park is good for things like that.”

The little league ball park is good for nachos, too, I think to myself as I nod in agreement.

It’s one of those slow summer days that I remember spending here with my grandparents during summers when I was younger. The clock seems to tick slower than usual, people move past us more leisurely. Even the birds are casual in their flight.

“It’s going to be a hot summer,” my grandmother says as she goes inside to flip the tape in the tape deck. As the door closes behind her a wave of cool air flows out and I wedge my foot in the doorway to maintain the breeze. “Close that door child, you’re letting the bought air out.”

I smile and pull my foot from the door. Yes, I remember summers like this.

adventure (farm) shoes

I’m officially the person standing on top of a hill, sandwiched between fields of soy beans and cow pastures, waving my phone in the air to get cell phone service.

I used to hate that person – not being able to stand being without a phone for five seconds, not being able to enjoy the world around them. That was until I was that person. Now I get blotches of cell phone reception and I’m forced to hang out in McDonalds for WiFi.

Sitting in McDonalds by myself eating french fries and soaking in internet access. This is me for 10 weeks. It feels necessary to bring back the “Adventure Shoes” tab of this blog.

No it’s not the same kind of adventure that Idaho and the Wild West held… but it’s a different kind of adventure.

It’s survival. And not the Elliott’s driving kind of survival. The no cell phone, dial-up internet, Piggly Wiggly kind of survival. And so the adventure begins. One day completed.

69 to go.

one for the road

I thought it was going to be harder.

I sat the keys down on the desk — a cluttered desk buried by notes and phone numbers and ideas scribbled in the fury that seemed to hover over the year — gathered my things and left. In the doorway I paused and looked back at the office that I’d lived in for the past four years. There are so many memories — good and bad, great and awful, scary and exciting — held in that room. So many experiences that will stay there, ones that won’t be had again.

In the doorway I flicked off the light switch and stood in the dark newsroom in the basement of the Grehan Journalism Building. This wasn’t just where I’d made newspapers, it was where I’d made friends. Some days it was where miracles seemed to happen. It’s where I’d made something of myself.

I shut the door behind me and left.

Another Monday paper was finished — my last Kentucky Kernel to be exact. But the newsroom looked the same, as did the hallway; campus was empty like it usually is in the late-night, early-morning hours when I take the long way to my car, desperate to unwind from the last 16 hours. Everything was as it always was. Except for me, of course.

I guess I expected something to be different. Maybe the world was going to stop spinning when mine stopped spinning around the Kernel. But it didn’t. Nothing happened. Instead I walked alone to my car and drove home. And just like that, the last four years of my life snapped shut.

I was happy it was over but somehow sad. It’s a weird feeling knowing that something great has to end for something better to start. It’s even weirder to feel the need to stand still, to hold on for just one more second so it can hurt more. It’s supposed to hurt more.

I thought it was going to be harder.