Little did she know...

WHAM. I was hit with the smell of the juniper bush I had parked by. It instantly took me back to 1998 and my grandparent's driveway and hot summer afternoons at the pool and early morning walks to the cafe for breakfast and popsicles on the back porch and the peculiar smell of the garage and games of Aggravation and UNO and mandatory nap time and driving the golf cart and always choosing the same movie from the library and binge reading Hank the Cow Dog and always having dessert after dinner and the magic of being a kid and the magic of having those wonderful grandparents to invest in my life and shoot do I miss them. 

Without fail, this song makes me feel nostalgic for, well, summer nights (also, last summer I sang this song while watching Jack under the stars..???? diditreallyhappenordididreamit ). Cheers to the summer. 

I think as kids we don't really grasp hardship and hurting. We certainly don't fully grasp the finality of death.  It's also assumed that hard things happen to other people and not us and certainly not regularly. I guess maybe we carry some of that into adulthood, the idea that hardship is a fleeting, foreign thing. Reality, however, has proven that hardship in one form or another is a constant. We carry hurt with us. We love, therefore we are vulnerable, therefore we can be broken. I can't resist a Coldplay quote here:  "Nobody said it was easy.  No one ever said it would be this hard." Also, as Jack Johnson so aptly summed up my childhood:  "We used to laugh a lot, But only because we thought That everything good Always would Remain." I realize it is naive and straight up false to say that every child lives a blissful, hurt-free life. There is SO MUCH hurt and darkness that children face every day all around us. And certainly I faced my

My little town faced fire a few weeks ago. Homes and lives were in danger.  It's a little surreal when you get the orders to grab the essentials and leave your home.  My life and home were never in imminent danger, but I had friends who could stand at their door and see flames headed straight to their home. Scary.  I don't like hard situations when I'm in them, but this reinforced to me again how great my community is here. As several of us rushed around to get out the door, we had a whole army of people offering help and beds and food. We had an influx of texts and calls to make sure we knew we needed to leave.  And the very next day? God's grace fell on our town. Rain to wash away the smoke, to put out the smolders, to bring sweet relief.  "...For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Matthew 5:45