Hope

I left the bedroom window open overnight for the first time this season. I awoke to the smell of cut grass and sprinklers, and the morning call of birds. Summer.

Today, summer feels bittersweet. 

I know that the bitter is mostly due to the effects of a lingering migraine, which blasted through my brain yesterday morning, pressing fire against my skull and nausea to my gut, and left, as usual, an inexplicable sadness in its wake. The sadness is the migraine.

But let's take the sadness anyway, and walk with it a little ways. 

Summer growing up was full of sprinklers and cut grass. Cool mornings with the promise of afternoon heat. Eating breakfast by the plate glass window in the kitchen of my grandparents' house. 

Grandpa ate slowly, and talked about the world and politics, and how a solid education and a heart in the right place could change the world. Grandma had less to say, but the good food was her doing. Homemade yogurts and jams and breads and bottled fruits. Summer mornings, the air smelled like hope and the promise that I could reach the stars if I stretched high enough. 

November, 2020. After many years of living in Australia, I still laugh at the seasons flipped upside down. Who would have thought November could mean sunlight and sprinklers?

But it is summer only here, far far away from my grandparents' house, which was sold long long ago, and renovated, and no longer matches the house in my memories. Grandma was buried before my grown child was born, Grandpa not long after.

And what of their hope, spread thick with strawberry freezer jam on a summer morning? Is there still hope in a world that is falling fast towards the deep, cold darkness of winter?

Longfellow walked in the darkness, deep within its wintery grip, and in the depth of its bitterness wrote "God is not dead nor doth He sleep."

I don't know if Longfellow was right. The God of my childhood, who protected me in his hands while my heart was good, and guided my people into the light, I think that God never was. My people walk themselves into darkness. Hatred. Mistrust. Scorn. They walk that way willingly, without looking back. 

It is summer in Australia, today barely touched by the darkness and cold wrapping its boney fingers around the north. We have light they do not have. We have freedom they do not have. We have warmth.

Perhaps we can grow hope here this summer.