Saying goodbye to Summer

Hello my dear friends. What a summer we have had this year. It has been filled with long hot days, trips away to see family and lovely visits here in our little town. I have been overwhelmed (in a good way) with inspiration this summer and have enjoyed sitting and absorbing as much as possible. The summer for me is never about output. I love the warm summer days and the kids being out of school. I let things go in the summer and really sink into the slow sticky rhythm of just enjoying each others company and letting the days float on.

This year we did our first road trip to the interior British Columbia to visit family, collecting memories and experiences along the way. Eating roadside peaches and swimming in cool lakes of turquoise blue. Visiting the the home of my dear friend’s mom and enjoying her life long garden and loving hospitality. At home we spent our days lazing in the backyard and watching the kids swim in the ocean. It always feels like summer is so long and yet so short.

This summer has also been bittersweet. This past spring we lost a dear member of our family Sheila, my husband’s mom. So full of life and energy, she lived for family, getting everyone together and keeping everyone connected. She was always stoping by for coffee or for a visit with the kids. Trading plants and gardening tips. We felt a palpable missing piece in the day to day of summer living without Sheila.

The garden is where I find joy and connectedness to the family both living and lost. The plants remind me of my family. My father is an avid landscaper and gardener his passion with perfect grass and a garden full of blooms is awe inspiring. My mother Joyce loved flowers and would fill the gardens with blooms every year. My dad’s mother, my grandmother, vegetable garden was a sight always full of carrots, strawberries and peas to sneak for a snack. And Sheila loved hollyhocks, lilacs, raspberries and anything with a purpose. If you were a weed or looked closely like a weed you were not welcome in my mother in law’s garden! Nor did you ever last very long.

In the garden is where I watched the seeds we planted sprout new life. Where we tended to the soil, tamed the weeds and got our hand in the dirt. This spring I called gardening ‘dirt therapy’. Digging into the dirt helped get to the roots of what I was feeling. The consuming grief of loosing another mother gone too soon.

What I found in the garden was a release. A chance to open my eyes to the sunlight of each morning. Stepping out each day to check on my seeds or water my growing sprouts gave me purpose. The kids were on a steady hum of day to day needs and I began to realize the plants sung a similar tune. As the summer crept on I began to open my heart to creating again. On seeing all the colours coming forth in the sweet peas and the snap dragons. The smell of the lilacs blooming and the earth waking up from a cold winter it began to not only thaw my garden but also my soul.

The changing of summer into fall has always been my favourite season. Neither one or another it is somewhere in-between. The cool mornings with warm bursts of sunlight throughout the day. The rain creeping in to remind us that fall is near, only to end the day with a sunset to light up the cool dark clouds. With each passing day saying goodbye slowly to summer.

There is something about the seasons shifting that is comforting. Putting the garden to rest, planting blubs for spring. It’s a winding down but also a promise of future renew. That even though everything is shifting, loosing leaves, blooms dropping. The garden will come back. That it is all part of the nature of things. Loss, life, transitions. We live with the grief and plant for the future. In the spring I will take solace again in seeing Sheila’s hostas and hollyhocks sprout back up in the garden. Plants she gave us from her own. The kids will eat strawberries she saved from her fathers garden (their great-grandfather) and gave to us. In the plants we will stay connected.