This summer

has been dubbed the "Golden Summer" by my mother. And indeed it is. I have a low stress job, I fill my days taking care of darling children, and I come home in the evenings to my kitties, my crazy parrot, and my mother. We eat the food we like, we watch Monk, we read good books. Sometimes I skip out to hit the town with my friends from high school, and we hang out in nice bars and meet nice people.

I used to equate Rochester with a prison and my parents as prison guards. I have about 8 diaries filled with those sorts of sentiments. Now I am blogging publicly about how much I love my hometown and how much I appreciate the time I am getting to spend with my folks. I wish I could go back and tell my 15 year old self all of this, but I suppose this was really something I had to learn the hard way.

Today I was reading in my new book, Morality for Muggles: Ethics in the Bible and the World of Harry Potter, and while it has all been very enlightening and entertaining, one quoted verse struck me as particularly relevant.

"Teach us to number our days, that we may form a wise heart." (Ps. 90:12)

Which reminds me of a more modern quotation that I picked up in a rather funny way. When my friend Julia (my big sister figure) was graduating high school two years before me, I looked up to her and strived to replicate aspects of her life in my own. One such aspect was her group of six close girlfriends (to be sure, I graduated high school with a strikingly similarly balanced group of six beautiful friends). Her friend Sarah had made miniature cardboard books for all of the girls in the group, and on each page of the little book was one word from this quote:

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

I remember flipping through the book with frustration, because if you read the quote word by word, it is a little hard to tell where the author is going with it. But then I got it, and I remembered it, and true to form, I made my own little cardboard books for my group of six when we left high school (only mine were a little more involved...I took it a step further, you might say).

[I am a firm believer that the context of discovering a quote is just as important as the message of the quote itself. Reader's Note: Julia graduated in 2007, so you can see that this whole business really made an impression on me.]

The Golden Summer is a one time deal--never before have I been this free of angst (though not totally free), and never again will I have so few commitments or worries. I have no stressful forthcoming adjustment or transition, as I will be going back to my beloved Cornell in just a few weeks, so I'm not anxious about some big life change. And I'm finally at the age when my parents and I can communicate as adults (though I may have demanded this kind of treatment earlier in life, perhaps I wasn't really prepared for it). Never before have I been 21 in this great little city of mine, and never again will the bar scene feel so fresh and new.

I am truly blessed, and I am making an honest effort to never forget that. These are the ideas I try to hold on to every day of my precious life, and most especially this Golden Summer.