Relatively Recent Ramblings (Part 1)

Well. It looks like I failed at keeping up with my blog . . . Alright. Yes, yet again. Although, in my defense I will say that senior year was by far the busiest I have ever been. Which is really quite an accomplishment to achieve, because I stayed pretty busy while at Bethel. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that I was able to fit so many activities into one year or for that matter into four years.

This summer has been incredibly different than I pictured. I’m not really sure why though. May was the busiest month of the summer. It started off with graduation, which is a very odd day. It almost seems like an anticlimactic end to four years of hard work, sleep deprivation, and DC food. I guess it’s really not fair to force one day to become more important than the 1,460 days that came before it. It’s really nothing more than a drop in the stream of time when compared to that. Although graduation day seemed short, it really is a marker in my life. It marked the day I wouldn’t get to live with my friends anymore, it marked the day that I entered into my grace period on my loans, it marked the day I stopped being an occupational student (For now at least. Who knows? Maybe grad school will be in my future one day. Regardless, I plan on being a life long learner.) Maybe the importance of the day isn’t so much in the 1,460 days that came before it, but rather in the possible 18,250 days that could follow it. 

After graduation, I went on choir tour in Michigan. It was a very bittersweet trip. In one way it was a trip of farewells and in another way it was like a homecoming. Growing up my family would spend part of the summer in Northern Michigan at my grandparent’s cottage. “Going up north” was always a highlight of the year. For a combination of different reasons, I hadn’t been up north in five years so I was excited to see Northern Michigan. A week before graduation marked the one-year anniversary of my grandma’s death and being in a place that spoke so much of her was a challenging celebration. It’s really amazing how many memories you can have attached to a place. Every day we would go somewhere or see something that brought about a flood of memories: the bridge in Charlevoix, the water tower in Mackinac, the Wal-Mart in Gaylord. I’m sure this crosses over into New Age-iness but bare with me. The memories made the places seem almost sacred. (Yes, I know it’s weird to think of a Wal-Mart as being sacred.) I guess the reason that the places felt sacred was that they served as a tool to connect me to someone that significantly impacted my life. To the person who taught me to love games, to the person who taught me to sew, to cook, to drink coffee, and who is a missed friend.  That is what made the places important. It was a trip to remember old memories and to make new ones with new friends, Ubbie Dubbie, sitting on a breakwater, and even climbing a mountain.