Summer's birth

On these August days summer wanes and sweat drips on my brow as the heat and humidity roast like an oven. Dandelion wishes blow across an open field with Autumn's promise of cooler temperatures and kaleidoscope burnt orange, brown, musty yellow leaves that hang menacingly close like a prized carrot just beyond our grasp. Expectation is in the air as student athletes practice in their empty stadiums suited in their college colors. Pencils, eight by eleven and half notebooks are sentinels on the grocery store aisles. The blank page awaits a child's scrawled handwriting of adventures that span the expanse of one's imagination. Where anticipation sits upon the precipice as the sunflowers dance in the wind with a sunset splattered in pinks, reds, and shadows as the tide turns and another season comes to an end.

The white-washed turn-of-the-century buildings whisper in hushed conversational tones as new and returning students fill the hallways of the oldest California community college. A breath of new life exhaled as stairs creaked and the walls listened. A sweet smile and kindness spoken without words were exchanged. It was a dawn of new beginnings with empty pages of what could be. Within a sea of strangers, education's path offered an open door to tomorrow's dreams. Dreams that were palpable as the beckoning stars when professors came to walk alongside you. Memory's shadows shutter through an abandoned house with yesterday's ghosts that haunt today's steps. As Boris Pasternak states about the character Lara's fate,"a nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid" so, are the names and faces from that time that have fallen into shadow. The hourglass's sands etch joy and sorrow in stone like a painted Monarch butterfly's wings.


Once again, I stand upon a threshold. Hope is birthed in what still can be and is to be written. As Frost aptly put it; there is "the miles to go" as I step forth back into crowded hallways, late nights, research papers, grades, and professors.