Homesick for Summertime

An ode to my hometown during the warmest months

There is something so, so very beautiful about the concept of summertime. All that warmth stretched out in front of you…seemingly endless, especially as a baby home from school. Days with not one thing to do except be at home, feel the sun’s heat on your cheeks, eat ice cream before it melts, sit with your mother.

Summertime in the south is extraordinarily distinct...and as I’ve aged, I’ve realized extraordinarily beautiful, too. And I don’t think I started realizing this until our honeymoon in New England. We got married towards the end of the initial pandemic lockdown, scared of anything happening to our wedding or our honeymoon. So a few weeks after our engagement in October of 2020, Price and I sat on my couch, I’m sure bowls of hot cookies in our laps, and researched the most beautiful places to honeymoon in the states. And by the grace of God, the Castle Hill Inn in Newport, Rhode Island appeared first thing, and we never once looked back.

We were married on Memorial Day weekend the next year, flying out to Boston that Sunday morning, renting a car, and meandering our way to our tiny beach cottage the next day. It was chilly when we landed, our masks a comforting warmth for once as we waited for the bus to take us where we first needed to go. And when we finally slowed down and turned onto the little pebble drive to the Castle Hill estate…I’d never fallen in love over a place as much as I had that one. Ached for it, and I’d only just arrived.

We spent our mornings dining on breakfast delivered to our door…pancakes, bagels and eggs, yogurt with bright red strawberries, leftover cookies I’d saved from the turnover service the night before. Sometimes we ate on the coffee table, watching the ocean out the window. Sometimes on the porch, watching the ocean right in front of us. The mornings were spent wandering through town, into little art shops and tourist tee shirt shops, lemonade stands. We took a trip one afternoon to Mystic, Connecticut, where we slowly walked the beach, a bookshop, an ice cream parlor, lunch at the pizzeria that inspired the Julia Roberts movie we’d watched while engaged. And our nights were spent driving Ocean Drive, looking up those homes on Zillow, talking about how one day we, too, would “summer” in Rhode Island, even if it meant living in a shack. Then sunset walks along the rocky shore, that clanging of the bell out in the ocean so oddly comforting to us now, despite our lives being rooted in Arkansas, miles and miles from the ocean.

I realized then how summer felt so different in that life. I remembered why, as soon as we stepped off the plane and were met with air so muggy I couldn’t take a deep breath. A southern summertime. So very bittersweet, so very exhausting. Mosquitoes and humidity and tornadoes and quiet. But yet…I fear I’d be homesick for it if I ever left.

Nearly three falls ago now, Price and I heard wind there might be an opportunity for him here in my hometown. As a child, surprisingly, I never really, truly thought about living here again one day. I think I always assumed that was off limits, something I wouldn’t be proud of, even. But once we were married, I couldn’t help but start thinking about having a baby eventually, and this little scrap of a desire to move back home wedged its way into my unspoken plans for one day. I, of course, thought about proximity to both of our parents, about the beauty of free public schooling, of teaching them to drive on our two-lane busy street instead of the interstate. But really, as the months went by, us waiting to hear back on Price’s job, I kept thinking of summertime there. How I wanted my babies to grow up in a small town, to grow up listening to the crickets and the train tracks at night, going to swim league on the weekends (the very same meets both Price and I were at as children…but never met), Friday night vanilla chocolate swirl ice cream cones from Andy’s (the fast food chain, not the fancy custard), play in the sprinklers in Mom and Dad’s backyard, learn to ride their bikes on the same wide sidewalks I did.

I started thinking about the hydrangeas bushes in my parents’ side yard, thinking about that smell when you spray a water hose that’d been sitting in the sun all day, the buzzing of the trees, the bugs, the high school football stands on the night of the first game, the very edge between summer and fall. Hot pavement in the morning, Fourth of July on the deck of my grandparents’ house. Watching for the mailman the afternoon teacher assignments came out, his white box truck so painfully slow as it made its way down our tiny street. Watching my brother practice kicking the football in an empty stadium, me running laps around him. Sitting in our screened porch after the sun went down, the air hot but comforting at the same time, lightning bugs and the sounds of the creaky ceiling fan and dogs barking before bed.

I was homesick, and summertime was what did me in.

I’ve thought it constantly to myself since Kit was born, life has never moved this fast…never this fast since the moment she was born. And I feel that so tangibly right now, as we creep upon the end of her first summertime in my hometown, now hers. We’re waiting for her baby cousin to be born this weekend, any moment now, and even that has made me realize how quickly time is passing. When we found out Savannah was pregnant, it was this far off thought, the concept that Kit would be nearly six months old by the time her baby boy was born…unfathomable. Yet, he’s on his way.

But even though I am constantly thinking about the passage of time, constantly heartbroken by it, I’m proud of the mother I’ve been this summer. I’m proud of the summer we’ve given her…her very first. I know one day, I’ll be happy to tell her little stories from these warm months with a tiny, new baby. Happy to tell her we didn’t let it pass by without savoring every tiny detail.

Early morning walks before the heat consumed those hours, just me and her and the birds, my podcast and her tiny pink stroller fan blowing on her sleepy face. A porch finally filled with rockers and a checked rug and gingham pillows for Annie to nestle in, a ceiling fan turned on for the first time (after I sprayed the wasp nests out), a swing wiped clean…a little living room outside the house, used nearly every night. My brother’s wedding on the steamiest morning of our lives, Kit and I laying on an empty guest room bed, our faces red, red, red. Price brought cool handcloths and laid them on our foreheads, foreheads that look the same. We grilled on the brick patio Price laid by hand, eating dinner on the floor while little baby watched us in her bouncer. We dressed her in big shirts and bloomers, striped pants and polka dot tops, little tennis shoes with hearts on them and ruffle socks. She rolled over for the first time the morning we took her on her first family road trip…I came to finish loading my suitcase to find her on her tummy in the middle of our bed, just smiling. She’s found her voice this summer, too…silly enough, a little raspy yell that I can’t wait to turn into words. But then again, I can wait.

I think at one point I thought moving back home would be a sign of defeat. Like this town I spent my entire life in was too small, too slow for success. As a sixteen year old, in love with what could be, all I saw was a town with no dreams. But as I’ve written about before, as the years have gone by, I feel so certain Jesus just reached down into my story, revealing dreams I’d had all along but hadn’t realized could be just that: my biggest dreams.

My daughter gets to spend her hot, sticky, quick, slow, sweet, and precious summers in the same old town I became myself in. She gets to call my home hers, waiting on the porch for her dad to come home after work. I get to live in this beautiful little cottage of a home, one with foggy windows in the afternoons from the heat, with pictures of our trips to Rhode Island framed all over our mantles and shelves, lighthouse paintings on the walls. I write my prayers in the mornings, my stories at night…and one day, hopefully, I’ll finish this book in my head, the one inspired by this town I love, its summers.

Missing summertime here was a powerful shift in my twenty-something year old brain, one that will shape and form my little family’s story for the rest of it.

This time last year, two months pregnant and just so very sick to my stomach, I was telling everyone who would listen that one day, I’ll leave here for the summer. Escape to Rhode Island, spend the warm months in sweaters, a cup of coffee by the ocean. Never experience the sickening three digit wet heat you could cut with a knife, sweat on my lip (the quickest, overstimulating little way to ruin my day), my distaste for summer clothes. That is still achingly appealing to me. And maybe one day I will.

But tonight, sitting on the porch, the beginning glimpses of autumn air blowing through our neighborhood, I don’t want to miss another summer here.