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.

prayer is not asking, it’s a longing of the soul

I sit silent in the pew as the pastel sea of people file into the church. I am 23, yet Easter morning is just the same as it was when I was younger.

My mother sits tying my brother’s tie and he grabs at his neck uncomfortably. She is squished between the two of us — a precautionary measure to make sure we don’t act up. I am 23, he is 18 and she still takes this precaution.

We sing, we pass trays of tiny glasses of grape juice and even tinier crackers (Brian of course manages to spill his on me and I sit through the rest of the service with a sticky calf. I guess I could have wiped it off but are you supposed to wipe the blood of Christ off your leg? Even with it being just the symbolic blood? I wasn’t sure, especially on Easter, so I left it). Then, the minister asks us to bow our heads in prayer.

I look around at the people with their chins tucked into their chests, hands clasped together and minds busy with prayer. I watch the sunlight streaming through the windows and lighting the cedar beams holding up the roof of the old church.

I haven’t prayed in a while. I’m not sure if I remember how.

I close my eyes and think about the huge pile of laundry sitting in the floor of my bedroom and I ask God to remind me to do my laundry, I never make time to do that anymore. I feel guilty praying for this type of thing, like somehow I am making a to-do list in my head instead of talking to God. But that’s the funny thing about praying. Sometimes what comes out just comes out.

I think about budgets — both news and the bank kind — about doctor’s appointments, fears, a rip in the leather of my car seat, uneasy feelings, scratched CDs, again about my empty bank account, awkward silences, uneaten cupcakes, unreturned phone calls, unsent emails, internship rejection letters, a sense of uselessness, Easter egg hunts, genies, wishes, the devil, deviled eggs, love, family, conditions and predictions.

Then the flood gates open and I pray they close again.

I pray for my mother and my father, pray they don’t hate each other, I pray for my brother and my sister. I even say a quick prayer for the brother I don’t’ speak to because I feel like I should. But of course that is the wrong reason to pray for someone. I pray for friends, for boyfriends and for their parents. I pray that my cell phone battery will stay charged for just one day. Then I find myself praying for answers to questions I haven’t even bothered asking.

I realize my prayer is getting too broad so I thank God for days like to day, sitting next to my mother and brother, and for afternoons like later where I’ll have lunch with my father. I thank God for tolerance because I know I’ll need it, and then, I thank Him for helping me find my iPod, for Redbox, for Mellow Mushroom, for visits from old friends, for down comforters and for Downey wrinkle releaser. It saved my dress this morning.

When the preacher begins to speak again my mother squeezes my hand in hers and I open my eyes. I rest my head on her shoulder and listen to the low, soothing voice of the man at the pulpit. I wonder what he prayed for. His prayers were probably better than mine.

I judge people sometimes from the emails they send me — the spelling and grammar, but also the tone and politeness, the humor and sincerity. I wonder if God judges people by their prayers.

I guess God doesn’t really judge. I close my eyes anyway and say a quick prayer for better prayers in the future.

Faith is a tricky thing. Even when you think you’ve lost it, it manages to find you. It even manages to find the bad prayers.