Summer is a dead, fallow season. No school, no rules, no structure, no guiding force to mark time. For most of my life, I've looked summer square in the eye and asked it to leave. As a child, I was thoroughly bored by the Fourth of July, ready to resume my regularly scheduled programming. When school is more of a haven, less of a prison, summer break becomes an exercise in dissociation, one I had become expert in. I loved school so much that I became a teacher, unready to leave that sanctuary after graduating from college. By the summer of 2008, I had spent nearly two-thirds of my life in a classroom, my life revolving around a bell schedule and a 180-day contract. When I did leave, at nearly 30 years old, I did not know what to do with myself.
I culled and cleaned
and closed my classroom in June.
And then I sat.
And then I waited.
And then I wondered.
What do I do.
Who do I be.
What becomes of me.
I was a student. And then I was a teacher.
One logical end leading to a logical beginning.
So I packed.
Packed and pretended.
Packed and pretended and prayed.
I stacked bowls and books and shoved them in boxes,
hoping we would all survive the trip to the desert,
the dry place where John and I would start anew.
I sifted and sorted, purged and pored over what amounted to my adulthood. For all the summers I wished would end as a child, this was the first one I felt the weight of grown-upness. I was leaving the place where I became who I would become. Endings are tolerable, but beginnings are brutal. I couldn't picture what I was walking toward, blindfolded by the future.
Through all the packing, pennies and quarters and nickels and dimes revealed themselves under cushions, behind shelves, tucked in corners. I collected them all in a Ziplock bag, thinking I would take them across the street to the church and light a candle. After a complete education in Catholic schools, lighting a candle in the chapel is my default position, my go-to move when I have spare change and spare worry.
On August 31, 2008, the moving truck arrived, empty and ready to be stuffed with our life. Professional movers began piling boxes, an actual game of Tetris happening before my eyes. I felt useless, watching and supervising experts who knew far better than I did and pointed out this fact when the boxes I packed collapsed on each other once stacked. Then I remembered my baggie of coins and headed across the street.
Walking into any Catholic church immediately puts me in a trance. In that moment, muscle memory took over and I reached with my right hand to the holy water, made the Sign of the Cross, and headed to the chapel on my left. I realize now that I have only ever lit candles in chapels for the Virgin Mary. She just gets me. Anyhow, I plunked my meager coin offering into the box and lit my candle.
Then I knelt and prayed.
And I started to cry.
And cry.
And cry.
I surprised my own self with how much I cried.
I didn't even know why I was crying.
Well, maybe I did.
I thought it was because we were moving, leaving the state where we had grown up, where we became home-owning, career-having adults.
There was a lady working in the church proper putting out fresh flowers, laying out holy stuff, I don't know what. I don't know her name and I couldn't pick her out of a line-up to this day. But she heard me crying in the chapel. And she came to see about me.
She didn't have any tissues, but she managed to track down some crumpled paper towels. I was practically hysterical by the time she found me and could barely speak. She told me I would be okay, she hugged me, she rubbed my back. And she asked me one question: "Are you praying for a baby?"
The question both stunned and confused me. Why would she ask me such a thing? Ma'am, what about me screamed "baby"? No, I'm not praying for a baby, thank you very much. I'm blubbering in this here chapel because I'm the baby. I don't know if I'm ready to be the adult I've always wanted to be.
But that's not what I said. She asked, and my answer was yes. I didn't know when I walked into the chapel that I was going to have a breakdown, and I certainly didn't know that I was gonna be praying for a baby. But her question made my answer immediately true.
In the chapel for the Virgin Mary
inside a church named for the patron saint of joy
On the feast day for the patron saint of pregnant women, childbirth, and children
unbeknownst to me,
I was praying for a baby.
On August 31, 2009, exactly one year later, that baby arrived. Katarina Elizabeth, the Kiddo, is the joy I didn't know I was praying for. She is our beginning, the one I knew I was terrified of but also the one I knew I needed. She makes summer sing, makes hot days worth trudging through, so revolutionary she is to the season I dread. When our girl arrived 365 days after lighting that candle, summer was born again.