Summer Sun

As I open my eyes, the sun is quietly peering through the half open blinds and gently casting its warmth across my bedroom floor.  I lie in bed for a while watching the sun move slowly across the floor and slide over the little red and blue flowers on my comforter as if it wishes to say hello.  I reach out my hand in greeting, and as I trace my finger around the flowers’ edges, I muse about the particularly profound beauty of the early morning sun peering through my window on a summer’s day.   Oddly enough it’s not the same at any other time. Perhaps because there is a simple delight in knowing that I don’t have to get up, there is pleasure in the softness of the sheets; a warmth that envelops not just my body, but my soul as well.   The winter sun does not shine into my room until my day is glaring at me and demanding I give it my full attention.  The spring sun is shy and hides behind the lampshade.  No.  It’s the summer sun that knows me best, and it is not long before its soft light gently nudges me out of bed.  As my feet touch the cool floor I am reminded of how happy I have been since my husband and I had the carpet pulled and the floor resurfaced and stained a milk chocolate brown.  With a smile, I sit at the edge of the bed, running my foot along the floor’s textured surface admiring how the light changes the color and reveals hints of red—it’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter that it took weeks for the men to complete the job of laying the floor, and I don’t mind that there is a chip on the edge of the tile floor in the bathroom where the tile and the concrete meet (though it wasn’t there before the men came).   It is of no consequence that the sink has a crack in it and the water leaks out a bit from the side of the faucet, or that the shower door does not slide smoothly from side to side as it once did, or that the paint is peeling a little on the door jam where the cat has been clawing at it.  As I stand looking in the mirror with the summer sun warming my room, it means nothing that I have failed and fallen short at times in my life, or that my feet and hands are beginning to show that I am getting older.  I take in the imperfections: each nick and scratch, each freckle, each wrinkle and line, and for one brief moment I accept where I am and who I have come to be.  The summer’s sun has this effect on me. 

 

            Since I am a teacher, a wife, and a mother, I hardly find the time to stop and truly enjoy all of life’s experiences, but the summer affords me moments like the one I previously described, and it gives me the opportunity to slow down and appreciate even brief moments of clarity. 

            One day while in class I remember thinking as I stood for the national anthem, “I don’t feel my life.” Looking around my classroom at all of my students I realized, “Everything I do is for someone else.”  I could not hear my inner voice that used to tell me that life was beautiful, meaningful, and worth all the effort.  I know I should have been gazing at the flag and remembering those who have given their lives so that I could be free, but instead I read the posters on the wall. The posters in my classroom have always reflected sentiments of hope and belief in oneself, but as I stood there I questioned—who am I now?   It’s not to say that at that moment I did not believe that life was worth all the effort, but I couldn’t feel it.  I couldn’t feel anything.  It’s one thing to have an intellectual belief that life has meaning and that you, as Walt Whitman said, may “contribute a verse;” it’s quite another to have that belief radiating in the heart, giving one an illuminating faith. 

            When I was younger, I believed in what the classroom posters said, and I thought I always would.  Life has a way of changing one’s perspective—and of giving one perspective.   For me, perspective came in the whispers of a summer morning sun.