The end of summer marks many things for us. My oldest beginning full time school… My middle turning four… My youngest *finally* calling me mama… Five months in Idaho, five months as homeowners, five months settling into a totally new life, one that has its highs and lows but that we love deeply. It’s has been a season of growth and change in so many deep ways.
I’ve been reminiscing lots about this past summer, and had to share some photos. They’re not perfect – many were shot on very, very expired film that I’d never dream of using on my clients and that gives unpredictable results, but it was free, just sitting in my office and waiting to be put to work. So, why not?
What I love isn’t that these photos are so perfect, it’s that this was the first summer I felt like I could almost give my kids one of my own childhood summers. With our move here, and getting away from living in such a busy and expensive and huge city, I feel like we’ve rewound the clock a little bit and found a place where we can do what we grew up doing. It’s a place where we can still afford swim and soccer and ballet, and where it’s all done for fun and not for competition, and where we can play in the sprinklers and do yard work on weekends and light fireworks on our driveway for the 4th and make friends at the park and swim in the river and stay up way too late because it’s light til 10pm and soak it all up – because even though it’s so blazing hot, it’ll be over before you know it and it’s time to enjoy it now.
I talk about it all the time because it grates on my nerves all the time, but social media has changed our ability to just enjoy the little things. It makes the mundane seem unimportant, which is so far from the truth. And so I suppose I always want to keep the curtains back enough to show that the imperfect, uneventful, very average life (mine, maybe yours) is deeply beautiful. Not because I always remember to believe this – but because I know it is truth, and one that I’m always working to live in light of.
So these are photos from our summer. At times so wonderful and filled with all the highlights of this wonderful city and these stages with our children, at other times filled with bored, bickering kids and 105 degree temps and smokey skies and an anxious countdown to the first day of school. I want to remember our half-done, weed-filled yard, my babies’ tans and little swimsuits and water play, and our trip up north that turned out to be incredibly expensive and stressful and yet still truly wonderful (story for another day!), and a season that felt both filled with activity and yet full of pause at the same time.
I hope your summer has held some sweet highlights, that your eyes can see the divine in the everyday, and that autumn brings renewal and peace.
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