Chasing Summer

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

to be published (or maybe not) on 27 September 2008

This year has brought me the unlikely gift of two summers: one in the Philippines, and another one in the US, where I spent the last two months. If I spend Christmas in Australia (or Chile, or South Africa), I would have three summers--that’s the maximum number of summers anyone can get in one year, unless perhaps you go to the poles.

I was just starting to miss warm, languid days heading off to placid Lake Balanan in Siaton, the ice-cold waterfalls of Valencia, the surreal pillars of soft corals in Bacong on a night dive--and of course, twilight walks on Dumaguete’s boulevard--when I was soon face to face with a nurse shark for the first time in my life on another humid night in Florida. That was only the beginning. Soon after, wild alligators in the grassy Everglades, waters more placid and icy in Lake Minnewaska and Niagara Falls in upstate New York, a walk in Central Park in the rain. All the surprises of a second summer spread out before me, one after the other.

Unexpected gifts do not always come in easily discernible forms. Many take their time to take shape, as slowly as a summer day unfolds on the North Pole. Some of them never take on any shape at all, like a dream that, many mornings later, still does not quite fade away.

The last official weekend of summer in New York, I find myself dragged to the beach by my family, despite my protests that I want to be home alone to work and to start packing. In a week, I leave for a new continent, to study in three different countries for the next 18 months. “Well, I will definitely not be swimming,” I say, “I hate the water here. It’s cold and murky.”

I sit on the sand, crowded with anxious thoughts, as my mother and brother wade laughing into the water. Sandpipers skitter at water’s edge, rushing to get their meal before the tide comes in. An albatross, mottled brown and white, stands still, looking at the large, green waves rolling endlessly upon each other.

My spirit betrays me. I drop my things and plunge into the cold water, swimming further out every time to meet each wave as it breaks. Unfamiliar seaweeds wrap around my legs, as unfamiliar as this Atlantic Ocean that engulfs me on the other side of the world from the place I used to call home. My body steels itself against the strangeness. But it is only a difference in warmth, after all. The constantly evolving certainties, the immensity of possibility--it is the same, whichever ocean I find myself in.

It begins to get dark; I make my way towards shore. As I come out of the water, a great wave pulls me back. As my heart does. I struggle against it, not wanting to shield myself from the inevitable, knowing in the chill of the wind and the quickly setting sun that the long nights of fall are coming.

I have lived through enough to accept that no matter how many summers I am blessed with, each one must have its end. But not without leaving its unexpected gifts.

Of knowing that with every passing summer, I understand the world a little bit more; the rest I still have to live by faith. Of understanding that I need not fully comprehend how each thing transforms me, irrevocably, before I can wholly embrace the complexity of a city, the heart of a beloved, the infinite greatness of God. Of discovering that new paths appear, and the opportunity for happiness knocks, only when I risk saying yes to every precious gift that is offered to me, unclear as yet in what form it comes or will become--especially when the gift is a person, as broken as I am, as whole and undefined.

As we pull out of the parking lot, rain falls in torrents, and just as quickly, ends. The shore is clean again, unmarked for the footprints of someone else’s summer.