Summers

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Over the years, I have had quite the ambivalent relationship with my hometown and, more specifically, my homecoming.   This homecoming usually occurs in the summer – as a student and now as a teacher, this is the time of year for family and friends.

Leaving college after my first year away to return to little Clarence Center, land of my birth and schooling, felt like a betrayal.  I missed my new best college friends days before I parted with them.  My heart ached in anticipation of three months of drudgery, crappy jobs, and small town life.  Family was no consolation, but a clan to be endured.

I dragged myself home the summer after second year of college, already missing friends and anxious about leaving to study abroad in Australia.  I was thrilled about leaving when I organized this year jaunt, but by the summer, I wondered if I had made the right decision.  I missed my friends, and felt like being alone all the time.  I awoke each morning, desperate to pull the covers over my head and sleep more.  I took naps in the afternoon, crying myself to sleep.  Sunk in gloom, I hardly knew my family was there.  I wasted away on my own.

When I returned from Australia, it was again with a great deal of anxiety about coming home.  I had missed home when I left, and now I missed Australia.  I felt like no one could understand how I had changed over that year, least of all my family.  I dreaded the anticipated judgment from family and friends about my weight gain.  There were few comments, but I suspect they were trying to be sensitive.

The summer after senior year of college found me at home for the least amount of time in any summer past.  After a graduation trip to New Orleans, I headed home to Buffalo for a few weeks before I started the training for my new job: New York City public school teacher.  These were still the summers before my dad’s future ribbing of “I hardly ever see you.”  Perhaps he was too busy taking care of the other siblings and hanging out with mom to worry too much about my time at home.  That concern would come later.

I made it home for a few weeks in 2003, the next summer, in between the grad classes I had to take in the city.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last good summer with my mom.  It was the last time she was pretty healthy and I didn’t think to drink in every moment.  I wouldn’t have known to do so, but I wish I remembered more about it.  I continued to see M, L and S, assuming they were home, as I had every summer since freshman year.

The following summer began early and ran later than any other.  Mom’s cancer had spread and I knew in my gut that by May I needed to be home.  I left teaching three weeks early and headed back home to Clarence, to our big split level house in the country, on 9 acres of wooded land, with an inground swimming pool and a barn holding our R.V.  I spent that summer enveloped in family and GRE studying.  I was drowning under the anticipation of the end.  I ducked out to set up my new apartment in New York and go to two weddings.  When I got back, we had a few weeks left, though I could not have known the date.  On September 1^st, she was gone and we pulled off the memorial service that Mom had planned for herself.  It was almost Labor Day and mom had always reminded us girls of the fashion faux pas of wearing white past that date.

The next summer was a flurry of movement, of seeing old friends and saying goodbyes.  I was moving to Austin and needed to close up my New York life.  Dad came to New York to help me pack and I wished, for the hundredth time, that mom was there to help organize, to plan, to get things done.  At this point, organizing was new to me, though I had about a year’s practice at holding a family together.  I wasn’t particularly good at either skill, but I would learn over the next few years that the brute force willpower one can throw into packing is ineffective when it comes to rebuilding a family.

The next two summers were glorious respites from the Texas heat, and I hit a scheduling stride: I liked this teaching thing.  Great weather all year in Austin, and “summering” in Buffalo, my other home with this one glorious season.  I made arrangements to visit New York each summer, see old friends and spend time with dad, who had grown increasingly vocal over the years about my distance from my hometown.  Half-joking, more than half-serious, he wished I were home more.  But it was just the perfect amount of time for me.

The summer before I left for Taiwan was brief, or felt brief.  There was much to organize, and so much I wanted to finish up in Austin.  I wanted to see the bats under the bridge at sunset – I couldn’t believe that after three years there I hadn’t managed to do that.  I wanted to go tubing, drink more margaritas, and swim in Barton Springs.  I anticipated a dearth of Mexican food in Taiwan and ate to my heart’s content.  I saw old friends again, in Austin, Buffalo and in Virginia.  A mini-reunion of college friends was the highlight of the summer.

This summer has seen me return to Buffalo from the furthest place I’ve lived to date.  After a month traveling in China, two weeks in Europe, I landed at the Buffalo airport where my sister met me in her new car.  Showing off the features while she drove me home, I felt the wind whip at my hair through the open windows.  It smelled like it always does there, some indescribable mix of grass, streetlights, and fog.  I’ve treasured the little moments each day there because I am painfully aware of their transience.  I have my family and friends in front of me for a limited time and I want to breathe it all in.

Particularly striking this particular visit was the day spent with L and D.  I haven’t had the opportunity to sit and talk with D in many years now, far too long I kept thinking.  There was this immediate sense of connectedness from the moment they walked in the café.  I was not surprised by this, as I had known this is what would happen.  This was the start of a new chapter in our friendship and the day moved on too fast, and there was too much to say, and not everything could be shared or said.  I kept thinking how grateful I was to know the two of them, and to have known them – as kids, and now as insightful, amazing adults.

Back in Austin, gearing up for a Taipei return in a few days, it is my time to reconnect with my life here.  My friend V in Taiwan reminded me, before I left, of the importance of reconnecting with life in the States.  Each summer for the past seven years, she has returned from Asia to participate in her old life.  If I continue living abroad, I hope I can keep doing this, keep making reconnecting a priority, like it has been in so many summers before.

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