hello june, goodbye spring

unexpected storms when you thought it was blooming season

You know those seasons where you’re just moving through each day trying to keep from drowning? I remember scrawling Jack’s Mannequin lyrics on my wrist when I was a new mother of two working the night shift in my husband’s final year of dental school, my makeshift tattoo: “I swim for brighter days despite the absence of sun.”

The last time I was here, I was in a blooming season—I was in a great writing flow, exercising my creativity at the end of a year when I had more time to pursue my own interests than I had since becoming a mother, about to embark on a vacation I’d dreamed of since high school. Then our family was hit with a series of losses and challenges, some unexpected, others anticipated but difficult all the same. Our week-long vacation became the first in a string of trips as we traveled out of town for the funerals of family members. One of our children’s personal challenges escalated to what felt like a crisis level of need. To top it off, school and the structure it provided ended right when my husband left for a brief military commitment.

Have you ever felt an earthquake? When I lived in Los Angeles, I felt them every month or so, usually a shift in the ground beneath me brief enough that I doubted what happened until someone else asked, “Did you feel that?”

I remember one bigger earthquake—not big enough to cause damage, but big enough to leave me shaken up, literally, for a while. For the rest of the day, I had a sense of vertigo. I didn’t quite trust the earth to stay still; I felt myself in motion even once the tectonic plates had settled down.

That’s how this spring has been—I haven’t always been sure if it’s the earth still shaking or if I’m simply still reeling, not yet stable after the last shuffle in what I thought was steady ground. There hasn’t been time for crafting stories—I’ve needed all my focus on building my days, keeping them balanced until they can crash down with me when it’s time to fall into bed.

But today, I sat down, turned on my novel’s playlist, and opened my document, and the words came.

Last week, I drove over twenty hours so I could see my best friend who I hadn’t seen in exactly two years. When we were two minutes from the park where we were meeting up, my son asked me, “What will you say when you see her?”

The answer was that we simply sat and talked about the things we’d been doing that week as our kids played on the shaded playground, the way we did when we lived one hundred feet from each other and spent every afternoon alternating between our homes. There’s always something in me that wants to mark an occasion with some declaration of significance, and it was significant to be with one of my favorite people in the world—to hug her instead of watching her face on a screen. But the simplicity of it, the ease of falling back into the rhythms of our friendship, had its own significance. It wasn’t a dramatic performance—it was coming home.

Coming back to my book tonight was the same. I’m still at that scary part of a story where I wonder if anyone else will ever take it in, if it will ever have an effect on anyone else—but regardless of where my characters go in the future, writing their story has changed me and cradled me throughout these months. Being unable to write these last few weeks has felt like another loss, tiny stacked up to the others I’ve been navigating, but a pinch in my heart all the same.

I’m grateful to be back.