This summer has been a traveling summer for me. I have friends who stay home all summer and I have friends who go from anywhere in the states to other countries. I fall more in the former category, but this summer was the beginning of an exception I hope will become the normal. Traveling is in my blood, and especially in the summer months or the beginning of the crispness of fall, I feel the urge to go out, to explore, and to experience life a little differently. To see and feel and sing and shoot and laugh and touch and taste and hear and be.
Five places in three wonderful months. Fargo, Woodland, Texas, Bemidji, Duluth.
My heart is packed with memories stacked so high that the slightest scent wafts and knocks them over. The smallest nudge from a "remember when" topples the tower. The softest whisper of the beginning of a story sends them crashing down. The tiniest touch causes them to collapse and I am left chasing photographs and words from the summer, carefully stacking and piling the many pieces into order. My fingers smudge the lens and there is coffee stained on that one and no matter how I try, I cannot smooth the wrinkles that dog-ear the pages of that particular piece of my story, but it is alright and it is good.
I carry these memories with me until they become too hard to hold and then I carefully pack them away in a box under my bed with tales told from when I was up to my mom's knees and I ate the blueberries from my dad's cereal. There is a chill in the air that beckons autumn, and so for a minute, I pull the memories close and savor them, really looking, really remembering. And then I breathe in the air and carefully close the box containing the moments from this summer, put them away for just a little longer.
Maybe in the chill winter months, when the world outside is coated in blankets of swirling snow, I will cradle a cup of tea and pull out the memories, a little more bent, a little yellowed, and the smell of summer and sun and water and sky all around will waft over me with the sound of laughter and the warm feel of freckled, sunburnt skin, the taste of berries plucked just second ago and the slats of wood on the dock. I will laugh and maybe feel a little melancholy and carefully rifle through the piles of memories from the summer while sitting in chill of winter.
Life will be different and I will hold those memories tightly and remember how it was that one summer, the first traveling summer. I will remember how I felt and the excitement I had and the feeling of stepping off the plane with the light streaming in beckoning soon coming dusk, holding my suitcases and realizing I had done it. And more than that, I was coming home. Because, traveling, I am very fond of you. But there is something sweet that no poet can describe in the simple act of coming home.
I will always have the memories to pull out and remember. And while I'm a traveling soul, home will always hold my heart.
